d leave-taking, there rose in her so deep a disgust for the
life of makeshifts and accommodations, that if at that moment Nick had
reappeared and held out his arms to her, she was not sure she would have
had the courage to return to them.

In her London solitude the thirst for independence grew fiercer.
Independence with ease, of course. Oh, her hateful useless love of
beauty... the curse it had always been to her, the blessing it might
have been if only she had had the material means to gratify and to
express it! And instead, it only gave her a morbid loathing of that
hideous hotel bedroom drowned in yellow rain-light, of the smell of soot
and cabbage through the window, the blistered wall-paper, the dusty wax
bouquets under glass globes, and the electric lighting so contrived that
as you turned on the feeble globe hanging from the middle of the ceiling
the feebler one beside the bed went out!

What a sham world she and Nick had lived in during their few months
together! What right had either of them to those exquisite settings
of the life of leisure: the long white house hidden in camellias and
cypresses above the lake, or the great rooms on the Giudecca with the
shimmer of the canal always playing over their frescoed ceilings! Yet
she had come to imagine that these places really belonged to them, that
they would always go on living, fondly and irreproachably, in the frame
of other people's wealth.... That, again, was the curse of her love of
beauty, the way she always took to it as if it belonged to her!

Well, the awakening was bound to come, and it was perhaps better that
it should have come so soon. At any rate there was no use in letting her
thoughts wander back to that shattered fool's paradise of theirs. Only,
as she sat there and reckoned up the days till Strefford arrived, what
else in the world was there to think of?

Her future and his?

But she knew that future by heart already! She had not spent her life
among the rich and fashionable without having learned every detail of
the trappings of a rich and fashionable marriage. She had calculated
long ago just how many dinner-dresses, how many tea-gowns and how much
lacy lingerie would go to make up the outfit of the future Countess of
Altringham. She had even decided to which dressmaker she would go for
her chinchilla cloak-for she meant to have one, and down to her feet,
and softer and more voluminous and more extravagantly sumptuous than
Violet's or Urs