be by my own choice.«
    The mother was reduced to trembling silence. She began to see that the
difficulty would be lessened if Gwendolen went away.
    And she did go. The packing was all carefully done that evening, and not
long after dawn the next day Mrs. Davilow accompanied her daughter to the
railway station. The sweet dews of morning, the cows and horses looking over the
hedges without any particular reason, the early travellers on foot with their
bundles, seemed all very melancholy and purposeless to them both. The dingy
torpor of the railway station, before the ticket could be taken, was still
worse. Gwendolen had certainly hardened in the last twenty-four hours: her
mother's trouble evidently counted for little in her present state of mind,
which did not essentially differ from the mood that makes men take to worse
conduct when their belief in persons or things is upset. Gwendolen's
uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called pictures of
life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality. Is that
surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at the opéra bouffe in the
present day would not leave men's minds entirely without shock, if the manners
observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own
families. Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What
horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque
through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish
over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and
artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful
effects when presented in our personal experience.
    Mrs. Davilow felt Gwendolen's new phase of indifference keenly, and as she
drove back alone, the brightening morning was sadder to her than before.
    Mr. Grandcourt called that day at Offendene, but nobody was at home.
 

                                   Chapter XV

 »Festina lente - celerity should
 be contempered with cunctation.« -
                                                              Sir Thomas Browne.
 
Gwendolen, we have seen, passed her time abroad in the new excitement of
gambling, and in imagining herself an empress of luck, having brought from her
late experience a vague impression that in this confused world it signified
nothing what any one did, so that they amused themselves. We have seen, too,
that certain persons, mysteriously symbolised as Grapnell and Co., having also
thought of reigning in the realm of luck, and being also bent on amusing
themselves, no matter how, had brought about a painful change in her family
circumstances; whence she had returned home - carrying