There were one or two women at his hotel, acquaintances of his, who had led the life of dressing, dining, party-going and evening dancing or riding, for an indefinite number of years; women who had tried every popular watering-place in the summer and many southern resorts in the winter, and who were getting stout and flashy, both as to diamonds and general effect; women who had money enough not to need to marry, and knowledge enough of the general quality of some of the men about them, not to care to marry; and such a general sense of loneliness and dissatisfaction with the dullness, staleness, flatness and unprofitableness of life, as made them not to care to live, and quite too keen a certainty of a life to come, to at all desire to risk embarking on that unknown sea on which diamonds and dinners, whist and mature old flirtations, could not be taken as cargo. Reginald had often wondered as he sat and talked nothing by the hour to these women, whether he or they were the most utter failures and bores. When this problem got too deep for him, he usually went to the bar; in fact, the bar was his grand resort, most of the time. But when these same questions presented themselves to these women, very few of them went to the bar or had the bar brought to them. They usually set to thinking, and then sometimes cried themselves so sick that their suppers were sent up to their rooms and eaten with the salt of tears. Now the difference in these cases of inanity was, that while the first useless mortal drowned himself in liquor and the second in tears, the result was the inebriation and steady animalization of the faculties of the one, while the other certainly escaped being classed with those who never ate bread in sorrow, and knows not the unseen powers. The boarders said that there had been what they called “tender passages” in history, between Mrs. Mancredo and Reginald. She had soft Italian eyes, which had cried many passionate hours, but they were always cooled off and black-leaded up; and then with a little pink to make the tear-stain pinker still, Mrs. Mancredo never looked much the worse for the honest but baffled scrutiny which she had made of life in general and her own in particular. But on the reverse, she looked just so much the better, as she was for the time less hard and world encrusted. At these times, if Reginald had not been too recently to his throne of consolation, the bar, he felt quite impressed by the element of womanliness which was visible in her tear-brightened eyes. On the evening after he had ventured on Ethelbert’s fuller acquaintance, and had had that ethical and æsthetic conversation, and the interesting _tête-a-tête_ with the rosebud, Petrarch and himself, Mrs. Mancredo had had a good long cry, so-called.