shivering, and the wind was turning up the feathers of a cock and two
croaking hens which had doubtless parted with their grown-up offspring and did
not know what to do with themselves. The railway official also seemed without
resources, and his innocent demeanour in observing Gwendolen and her trunks was
rendered intolerable by the cast in his eye; especially since, being a new man,
he did not know her, and must conclude that she was not very high in the world.
The vehicle - a dirty old barouche - was within sight, and was being slowly
prepared by an elderly labourer. Contemptible details these, to make part of a
history; yet the turn of most lives is hardly to be accounted for without them.
They are continually entering with cumulative force into a mood until it gets
the mass and momentum of a theory or a motive. Even philosophy is not quite free
from such determining influences; and to be dropt solitary at an ugly
irrelevant-looking spot with a sense of no income on the mind, might well prompt
a man to discouraging speculation on the origin of things and the reason of a
world where a subtle thinker found himself so badly off. How much more might
such trifles tell on a young lady equipped for society with a fastidious taste,
an Indian shawl over her arm, some twenty cubic feet of trunks by her side, and
a mortal dislike to the new consciousness of poverty which was stimulating her
imagination of disagreeables? At any rate they told heavily on poor Gwendolen,
and helped to quell her resistant spirit. What was the good of living in the
midst of hardships, ugliness, and humiliation? This was the beginning of being
at home again, and it was a sample of what she had to expect.
    Here was the theme on which her discontent rung its sad changes during her
slow drive in the uneasy barouche, with one great trunk squeezing the meek
driver, and the other fastened with a rope on the seat in front of her. Her
ruling vision all the way from Leubronn had been that the family would go abroad
again; for of course there must be some little income left - her mamma did not
mean that they would have literally nothing. To go to a dull place abroad and
live poorly, was the dismal future that threatened her: she had seen plenty of
poor English people abroad, and imagined herself plunged in the despised dulness
of their ill-plenished lives, with Alice, Bertha, Fanny, and Isabel all growing
up in tediousness around her, while she advanced towards thirty, and her mamma
got more and more melancholy. But