But this, she knew, was not so, for her face was perfectly unharmed; and yet she felt that she could hardly have been more miserable, even with a broken nose.
Here she paused for an instant in order to establish herself securely in her argument, for, though she could by no stretch of the imagination regard her mind as of a meditative cast, there are hours when even to the most flippant experience wears the borrowed mantle of philosophy.
Abstract theories of conduct diverted her but little; what she wanted was some practical explanation of the mental weariness she felt.

What she wanted, she repeated, as if to drive in the matter with a final blow, was to be as happy in the actual condition as she had told herself that she might be when as yet the actual was only the ideal.

Why, for instance, when she had been wretched with but one man on the box, should the addition of a second livery fail to produce in her the contentment of which she had often dreamed while she disconsolately regarded a single pair of shoulders?
That happiness did not masquerade in livery she had learned since she had triumphantly married the richest man she knew, and the admission of this brought her almost with a jump to the bitter conclusion of her unanswerable logic--for the satisfaction which was not to be found in a footman was absent as well from the imposing figure of Perry Bridewell himself.

Yet she told herself that she would have married him had he possessed merely the historical penny, and the restless infatuation of those first months was still sufficiently alive to lend the colour of its pleasing torment to her existence.
Lying there, in her French embroidered night dress, with her brilliant red hair pushed back from her forehead, she began idly to follow the histories of the people whom she knew, and it seemed to her that each of them was in some particular circumstance more fortunate than she.

But she would have changed place with none, not even with her best friend, Laura Wilde, who was perfectly content because she lived buried away in Gramercy Park and wrote vague beautiful verse that nobody ever read.
Laura filled as little part in what she called "the world" as Gramercy Park occupied in modern progress, yet it was not without a faint impulse of envy that Gerty recalled now the grave old house mantled in brown creepers and the cheerful firelit room in which Laura lived.