“What can I say to your uncle, Gwendolen? Consider the position you place me in. You led him to believe only last night that you had made up your mind in favor of Mr. Grandcourt.” “I am very sorry to cause you annoyance, mamma, dear, but I can’t help it,” said Gwendolen, with still harder resistance in her tone. “Whatever you or my uncle may think or do, I shall not alter my resolve, and I shall not tell my reason. I don’t care what comes of it. I don’t care if I never marry any one. There is nothing worth caring for. I believe all men are bad, and I hate them.” “But need you set off in this way, Gwendolen?” said Mrs. Davilow, miserable and helpless. “Now mamma, don’t interfere with me. If you have ever had any trouble in your own life, remember it and don’t interfere with me. If I am to be miserable, let it be by my own choice.” The mother was reduced to trembling silence. She began to see that the difficulty would be lessened if Gwendolen went away. And she did go. The packing was all carefully done that evening, and not long after dawn the next day Mrs. Davilow accompanied her daughter to the railway station. The sweet dews of morning, the cows and horses looking over the hedges without any particular reason, the early travelers on foot with their bundles, seemed all very melancholy and purposeless to them both. The dingy torpor of the railway station, before the ticket could be taken, was still worse. Gwendolen had certainly hardened in the last twenty-four hours: her mother’s trouble evidently counted for little in her present state of mind, which did not essentially differ from the mood that makes men take to worse conduct when their belief in persons or things is upset. Gwendolen’s uncontrolled reading, though consisting chiefly in what are called pictures of life, had somehow not prepared her for this encounter with reality. Is that surprising? It is to be believed that attendance at the _opéra bouffe_ in the present day would not leave men’s minds entirely without shock, if the manners observed there with some applause were suddenly to start up in their own families. Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience. Mrs. Davilow felt Gwendolen’s new phase of indifference keenly, and as she drove back alone, the brightening morning was sadder to her than before. Mr. Grandcourt called that day at Offendene, but nobody was at home. CHAPTER XV. “_Festina lente_—celerity should be contempered with cunctation.”—SIR THOMAS BROWNE.