Satiety had come. It came in a day. The fatal day that comes to all the favoured and the fortunate, and which never comes to the poor and the unlucky. That evil at least is spared to Nature's stepchildren. They never have too much of anything, except debt and difficulty. They never yawn in each other's faces, and ask themselves where they can go for the summer. They never turn over the leaves of a Continental Bradshaw and complain that they are tired of everywhere. It is the people who can go everywhere and have everything who find the wide earth a garden run to seed, and feel the dust of the desert in their mouths as they talk of the pleasure places that the herd long for. This time had come for Vera, at the end of her third season as Claude Rutherford's wife. He, the gay and the insouciant, was careless still, but it was a new kind of carelessness: the carelessness that comes from hating everything that an exhausted life can give. They had fallen into the fashion of their friends of late, and were more like the normal semi-detached couple than the boy and girl lovers upon whose bliss Lady Susan had loved to expatiate. When the Goodwood week came round in this third year with the inexorable regularity that one finds in the events of the season, Vera declared that she had had enough of Goodwood and would never go there again. "Of course, that won't prevent your being there," she said. "Well, not exactly, when I have Iseult of Ireland in two races." "Yes, of course, you must be there. I forgot." "You seem always to forget my horses nowadays. Yet you were once so keen about them." "They were very interesting at first, poor, sweet things, but the fonder I was of them, the more cruel it seemed to race them." "You'd like them kept to look at, eh?" "I should like to sit with them in their boxes, and feed them with sugar, and make them lie down with their heads in my lap." "A Lady Rarey!" "I sometimes long for a paradise of animals, some lovely pastoral valley with a silver stream winding through the deep grass, where I might live among beautiful innocent creatures--sheep, and deer, and Jersey cows, and great calm, cream-coloured oxen from the Campagna. Creatures that can lie in the sun and bask, knowing nothing of the past, feeling nothing but the warmth and beauty of the world; and where I myself should have lost the faculty of thought." "That's a queer fancy." "I have many queer fancies. They come to me in my dreams." "You'd much better come to Goodwood. All the world will be there, and you'd like to see Iseult win. Haven't you enough frocks? Is that the reason for not coming?" "I have too many frocks, some that I have never worn." "Hansel them at Lady Waterbury's. You'll be the prettiest woman there." "It's dear of you to say that"--her eyes clouded as she spoke--"but I can't go. I'm so tired of it all, Claude, so tired!"