with no one but herself to
consider, had made her less easy to live with. So without exactly
knowing how, she drifted into spending almost all her time abroad. Every
other year she came back for visits in the summer, but in the spring,
autumn, and winter she wandered from one cheap _pension_ to another in
Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland.

If she had led a half-occupied life as keeper of her father's house, she
now learnt the art of getting through a day in which she did absolutely
nothing. When she became accustomed to it, the very smallest service
required of her was regarded as a cross. Sometimes a relation would
commission her to buy something abroad, and then the _salle a manger_
would resound with wails, because she must go round the corner, select
an article, and give orders to the shopman to despatch it to England.
The friends who asked her to engage rooms for them at an hotel, had
cause to rue their request; they never heard the end of it.

Many lonely women receive great solace from their church, and give
solace in return. Where would the church and the poor be without them?
But Henrietta was never long enough in her caravanserais to become
attached to the services of the chaplains in the _salle a manger_, and
she soon gave up churchgoing. At first she spent a great deal of time
inventing reasons to keep her conscience quiet, such as that it had
rained in the night and therefore might rain again, or that she did not
approve of chanting Amen, but later she did not see why there should be
a reason, and left her conscious to its remorse.

Bad health is another resource for unoccupied women, and it certainly
occurred to her as an occupation, but she realized that it and roving
cannot be combined, and of the two she preferred roving.

Her chief pastime was to skim through novels, any novels that could be
found, costume novels of English history by preference. This was how her
bent for learning satisfied itself. She never remembered the author, or
title, or anything of what she read, but at the same time she was
obsessed with the idea that she must always have something new, and
would constantly accuse her friends, or the library, of deceiving her
with books she had read before. "If you can't remember, what does it
matter?" her dreadfully reasonable nieces would exclaim, not realizing
that her sole interest in the novels was the collector's interest of
seeing how many new ones she could find.

A