“Ah, no, not very much,” said Katherine, with a touch of bitterness. “We only differ a little through the circumstances of our upbringing, nationality, and so on. We are all the same at heart, weary of ourselves, of life, of each other. Most women have their homes, their children, their pleasant circle of friends. None of us has. We are failures. Either we have sought to get too much from life and heaven has punished us for presumption, or circumstance has been against us--we have been too poor to conquer it. Ah, no, my dear child, don't think that we are merely a set of selfish, coarse, ill-tempered women. Each of us knows in her own heart that she is a failure, and she knows that all the others know it.” A flush of colour bad come into her delicate cheek as she said this, and her lips closed rather tightly, showing fine, almost imperceptible vertical lines. Yet her eyes looked kindly at Felicia and smoothed any rough impression her words may have made. The other's eyes met hers rather wonderingly. The tragedy that underlay this commonplace pension life was a new conception. “I'll try to think more kindly of them,” she said. “And what about poor me?” “Ah, you! I have never thought unkindly about you. In fact, I have wanted to know you, but you have always been so distant and reserved, until this evening; you and Mr. Chetwynd. He is so clever, and so old--and I am only a girl--that I am afraid of boring him.” Katherine laughed at her naïve confusion. “Why, Mr. Chetwynd is the kindest and most courteous old man in the world! I'll tell you what we'll do. I will get your seat moved up to our end of the table--away from Mme. Boccard, who has had you long enough--and then you can sit next to him. Would you like that?” Felicia assented gladly. Mme. Boccard was a rather oppressive neighbour. Her conversation was as chaff before the wind, both in substance and utterance; and the few straws that Felicia, with her schoolgirl's knowledge of French, was able to seize, did not afford her much satisfaction. “How can I thank you for being so kind to me?” she said, a little later, before they parted for the night. “By calling me Katherine sometimes,” said the other. “I am not so very, very old, you know; and, my dear child, it would comfort me.” Felicia went to sleep that night happier than she had done since her arrival in Geneva. But she pondered many things before her eyes closed. She was ready to pity Mme. Popea for being a failure, but Mrs. Stapleton had failed to explain to her the necessary connection between an unhappy life and _Le Journal Amusant_. If the latter was a necessary solace, it brought fresh terrors to the anticipation of sorrow. CHAPTER II.--KATHERINE. |Don't waste your pity upon me,” wrote old Mr. Chetwynd to his son Raine, an Oxford don. “This is not the Euxine, and even if it were, there would be compensation.