him sell the simple
old house in which they had always lived, on an unfashionable
up-and-down-hill street of the West End, if he had not taken one of his
stubborn stands, and let it for a term of years without consulting her.
But she had her way about their own movements, and they began that life
of hotels, which they had now lived so long that she believed any other
impossible. Its luxury and idleness had told upon each of them with
diverse effect.

They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she
had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was
not much more than half the weight of his prime. Their digestion was
alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines
Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result. She was sure
that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one
who ought to have wasted away. But she had before her the spectacle of
a husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did
not audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such
measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of
storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the
side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear
when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own
dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one
of the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman
could to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they
could neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over
with herself before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of
sending them back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring
when the Landers came away for the summer.

They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of
Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New
York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and St.
Augustine. They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early in
the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where Mrs.
Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to a
Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to
Florida in January. She would not on any account have gone directly to
the city from the mountains, for people who did that wer