She once dropped, to
her daughter, in a moralising mood, the remark that it was
astonishing how many of them one could know without its doing one any
good. Fifty of them--even very clever ones--represented a value
inferior to that of one stupid woman. Rose wondered at the offhand
way in which her mother could talk of fifty clever men; it seemed to
her that the whole world couldn't contain such a number. She had a
sombre sense that mankind must be dull and mean. These cogitations
took place in a cold hotel, in an eternal Swiss rain, and they had a
flat echo in the transalpine valleys, as the lonely ladies went
vaguely down to the Italian lakes and cities. Rose guided their
course, at moments, with a kind of aimless ferocity; she moved
abruptly, feeling vulgar and hating their life, though destitute of
any definite vision of another life that would have been open to her.
She had set herself a task and she clung to it; but she appeared to
herself despicably idle. She had succeeded in not going to Homburg
waters, where London was trying to wash away some of its stains; that
would be too staring an advertisement of their situation. The main
difference in situations to her now was the difference of being more
or less pitied, at the best an intolerable danger; so that the places
she preferred were the unsuspicious ones.
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