Yet, to-day, it did not seem sufficient.

She was not really so very much interested in her clothes; not nearly enough interested to make them a compensation for such fatigue and loneliness as she was now feeling.

And as she realised this, a further question followed: in what was she particularly interested?
What was a sufficient motive for all the European journeyings with which her life, for the past ten or twelve years, had been filled?
In a less jaded mood, in her usual mood of mild, if rather wistful, assurance, she would have answered at once that she was interested in everything--in everything that was of the best--pictures, music, places, and people.

These surely were her objects.
She was that peculiarly civilised being, the American woman of independent means and discriminating tastes, whose cosmopolitan studies and acquaintances give, in their multiplicity, the impression of a full, if not a completed, life.

But to-day the gloomy question hovered: was not the very pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the study of archaeology in Rome, and of pictures in Florence, of much the same nature as the yearly visit to Paris for clothes?
What was attained by it all?
Was it not something merely superficial, to be put on and worn, as it were, not to be lived for with a growing satisfaction?
Miss Jakes did not answer this question; she dismissed it with some indignation, and she got up and rang rather sharply for tea, which was late; and after asking the garcon, with a smile that in its gentleness contrasted with the sharpness of the pull, that it might be brought at once, she paused near the table to lean over and smell her sheaf of roses, and to read again, listlessly, Miss Harriet Robinson's words of affectionate greeting.