was accustomed, she would gladly have spent
the winter alone with her children and their governess had there not
arrived at the hotel a woman she had known for many years and who was in
a position oddly similar to her own. At school she had been Gertie
Cottle. In New York she was Mrs. Harry Scadding. She was now Mrs. G.
Cottle Scadding for purposes of exact identification. She also had
"freed herself"; she also had had a snapshot in the cheaper dailies; she
also traveled with two children. It was impossible for Edith not to meet
her and engage in amicable conversations, during which the lady talked
freely of her "case," discussing the merits and demerits of her "co-,"
as though that person had been a kind of partner.

She was a lively young woman, frank and amusing. Moreover, she knew the
people who made up Edith's small world, and Edith was lonely. While the
two sets of children played together the two mothers sat on the terrace
and talked. It was talk in which Edith was chiefly a listener, but a
listener who couldn't deny that she was entertained. She was
uncomfortable only when discerning compatriots appeared, and with
visible nods and smiles rated them as "two of a kind." It was a kind
over which she and Chip had smiled and nodded many a time during their
wanderings in Europe, never thinking that she herself should ever be
classed in the number.

She had been able to take the situation lightly then--this curious
situation of the "freed" American wife, with or without children,
drifting through Europe, aimless, and generally better off when
friendless. But she began to be sorry for the type. Instead of shrinking
from Gertie in the presence of the discerning compatriots, as she was at
first inclined to do, she made it a point to be seen with her,
championing the sisterhood of loneliness. There were moments when this
association might not have been discreet; but they were also moments in
which--so it seemed to Edith--discretion was not a part of valor. Once
or twice she accompanied her friend to Nice; once or twice to Monte
Carlo. On each of these occasions she found herself in a gathering of
cosmopolitan odds and ends in which she was not at ease; but
championship being new to her, she felt obliged to take its bitter with
its sweet. That it was mostly bitter gave her additional ground of
complaint against Chip. He had driven her to a kind of deterioration, a
deterioration she couldn't define, but of which, as of some