She was forced to speculate, not only because she was brought into intimate touch with the unfamiliar, but also because there was little else to do. The Pension Boccard was neither gay nor stimulating in winter. Its life was dependent, first upon the ever-changing current of guests, and secondly upon such public distractions as Geneva offers. In the summer it was bright enough. The house was full from top to bottom with eager, laughing holiday-makers, bringing with them the vitality and freshness of the outside world. There were dances, flirtations, picnics. New ideas, scraps of gossip and song from London, Paris, St. Petersburg filled dining-room and salons. The pleasant friction of nationalities alone was stimulating. The town, too, was gay. The streets were bright with the cosmopolitan crowd of pleasure-seekers, the _cafés_ alive with customers, the shop windows gay with jewellery and quaint curios to dazzle the eyes of the reckless tourist. At the Kursaal were weekly balls, entertainments, _petits chevaux_. Bands played in the public gardens, and all the _cafés_ offered evening concerts gratis to their customers. There were pleasant trips to be made on the lake to Nyon, Lausanne, Montreux, Chillon. No one need be dull in summer time at Geneva. But in the winter, when all the public festivities were over and week after week passed without a stranger bringing a fresh personality to the dinner-table, the Pension Boccard was an abode of drear depression. If it had been chipped off from the earth's surface by the tail of a careless comet and sent whirling through space on an ecliptic of its own, it could not have been less in relation with external influences. It was thrown entirely on its own resources, which only too often gave way, as it were, beneath it.