e milliners for boxes of hats which she tried on, and
kept for days, without being able to make a choice. Now and then she
even sent her maid up to Paris to bring back great assortments of veils,
gloves, flowers and laces; and after periods of painful indecision she
ended by keeping the greater number, lest those she sent back should
turn out to be the ones that were worn in Paris. She knew she was
spending too much money, and she had lost her youthful faith in
providential solutions; but she had always had the habit of going out to
buy something when she was bored, and never had she been in greater need
of such solace.

The dulness of her life seemed to have passed into her blood: her
complexion was less animated, her hair less shining. The change in her
looks alarmed her, and she scanned the fashion-papers for new scents
and powders, and experimented in facial bandaging, electric massage and
other processes of renovation. Odd atavisms woke in her, and she began
to pore over patent medicine advertisements, to send stamped envelopes
to beauty doctors and professors of physical development, and to brood
on the advantage of consulting faith-healers, mind-readers and their
kindred adepts. She even wrote to her mother for the receipts of some of
her grandfather's forgotten nostrums, and modified her daily life, and
her hours of sleeping, eating and exercise, in accordance with each new
experiment.

Her constitutional restlessness lapsed into an apathy like Mrs.
Spragg's, and the least demand on her activity irritated her. But she
was beset by endless annoyances: bickerings with discontented maids, the
difficulty of finding a tutor for Paul, and the problem of keeping him
amused and occupied without having him too much on her hands. A great
liking had sprung up between Raymond and the little boy, and during the
summer Paul was perpetually at his step-father's side in the stables
and the park. But with the coming of winter Raymond was oftener away,
and Paul developed a persistent cold that kept him frequently indoors.
The confinement made him fretful and exacting, and the old Marquise
ascribed the change in his behaviour to the deplorable influence of his
tutor, a "laic" recommended by one of Raymond's old professors. Raymond
himself would have preferred an abbe: it was in the tradition of the
house, and though Paul was not of the house it seemed fitting that he
should conform to its ways. Moreover, when the married sisters