e Place de
la Concorde, irresolute, because of the endless variety of possible ways
to turn, and places to visit. She seldom made definite plans the day
before, unless it were for the pleasure of changing them. The letter of
introduction to Madame Vauchelet had remained unpresented. The sense of
solitude, combined for the first time with that of freedom, was too
delightful to forego. One must have time to realize and appreciate the
sudden calm and serenity; the sudden absence of claims and obstructions
and harassing criticisms. Heavens, what a price people consented to pay
for the privilege of human ties! what hard bargains were driven in the
kingdom of the affections! Thieves, extortionists, usurers--and in the
name of all the virtues!

"Yes, solitude has charms!" Hadria inwardly exclaimed, as she stood
watching the coming and going of people, the spouting of fountains, the
fluttering of big sycamore leaves in the Champs Elysees.

Unhappily, the solitude made difficulties. But meanwhile there was a
large field to be explored, where these difficulties did not arise, or
could be guarded against. Her sex was a troublesome obstruction. "One
does not come of centuries of chattel-women for nothing!" she wrote to
Algitha. Society bristled with insults, conscious and unconscious. Nor
had one lived the brightest, sweetest years of one's life tethered and
impounded, without feeling the consequences when the tether was cut.
There were dreads, shrinkings, bewilderments, confusions to encounter;
the difficulties of pilotage in unknown seas, of self-knowledge, and
guidance suddenly needed in new ranges of the soul; fresh temptations,
fresh possibilities to deal with; everything untested, the alphabet of
worldly experience yet to learn.

But all this was felt with infinitely greater force a little later, when
the period of solitude was over, and Hadria found herself in the midst
of a little society whose real codes and ideas she had gropingly to
learn. Unfamiliar (in any practical sense) with life, even in her own
country, she had no landmarks or finger-posts, of any kind, in this new
land. Her sentiment had never been narrowly British, but now she
realized her nationality over-keenly; she felt herself almost
grotesquely English, and had a sense of insular clumsiness amidst a
uprightly, dexterous people. Conscious of a thousand illusive, but very
real differences in point of view, and in nature, between the two
nations, she had a