Poor little gentlefolk, roving about from one
boarding-house to another, always in search of the cheapest, sometimes
getting into boarding-houses where the cheapness of the food
necessitates sending for the doctor, so the gain on one side is a loss
on the other. Poor little gentlefolk, the odds-and-ends of existence,
the pence and threepenny bits of human life!
That Doris's singing should have provoked remarks painfully
inadequate, mattered little. Inadequate remarks about singing and
about the other arts are as common in London drawing-rooms as in
hotels and boarding-houses (all hotels are boarding-houses; there is
really no difference), and the company I found in these winter resorts
would have interested me at any other time. I can be interested in the
woman who collects stamps, in the gentle soul who keeps a botany book
in which all kinds of quaint entries are found, in the lady who writes
for the papers, and the one who is supposed to have a past. Wherever
human beings collect there is always to be found somebody of interest,
but when one's interest is centred in a lady, everybody else becomes
an enemy; and I looked upon all these harmless spinsters as my
enemies, and their proposals for excursions, and luncheons, and
dinners caused me much misgiving, not only because they separated me
from Doris, but because I felt that any incident, the proposed picnic,
might prove a shipwrecking reef.
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