It--it makes me sick, mother..." [Mrs.Warren--or Madame Varennes--whimpers a little, but soon cheers up, rings the bell for her maid preparatory to dressing and being the business woman over her preparations for departure.

She notes the address of Vivie's hotel and promises to call for her there in the _auto_ at three o'clock.

Vivie leaves her, descends the richly carpeted stairs--the lift is worked by an odiously pretty, little, plump soubrette dressed as a page boy--and goes out into the street.
Several lounging men stare hard at her, but decide she is too English, too plainly dressed, and a little too old to neddle with.
This last consideration is apparent to Vivie's intelligence and she muses on it with a wistful little smile, half humour, half regret.
She will at her leisure write a whole description of the scene to Michael.] Those who come after us will never realize how delightful was foreign travel before the War, before that War which installed damnable Dora in power in all the countries of Europe, especially France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, and Holland.

They will not conceive it possible that the getting of a passport (as a mere means of rapidly establishing one's identity at bank or post-office) was a simple transaction done through a banker or a tourist agency, the enclosing of stamps and the payment of a shilling or two; that there was no question of _visas_ entailing endless humiliation and back-breaking delays, waiting about in ante-rooms and empty apartments of squalid, desolating ugliness situate always in the most odious parts of a town.

But the Foreign Offices of Europe were agreed on one topic, and this was that having got their feet back on the necks of the people, their serfs of the glebe should not, save under circumstances hateful, fatiguing, unhealthy and humiliating, travel through the lands that once were beautiful and bountiful and are so no longer.
So: Vivie, never having consciously been abroad before (though she was later to learn she had actually been born in Brussels), began to experience all the delights of travel in a foreign land.