But when she had finished the houses, and designed more costumes than she could wear, she looked about her for fresh worlds to conquer, and discovered that she was up against the boundaries. Walls everywhere! She could do anything she chose, travel, buy clothes, motors, an aeroplane if she wanted it, only she did not. She next went through a phase when she decided that the people with whom she was thrown were intolerable, representing a frivolous and empty-headed society. Her imagination dwelt on the class who "did things," "the dreamers," she called them to herself, who adorned a brilliant, picturesque, delightfully haphazard Bohemia, where, at feasts, principally of red wine and bloomy, purple grapes, laughter pealed to the rafters, and the conversation sparkled as if sprinkled with stardust. She strove to enter this Olympian vagabondia, and found herself entangled in the nets of many fowlers, sycophantic, impecunious, and, unsated of their many banquets, physically hungry. She began to have seasons of ennui and depression, increasing in frequency. What was the matter with her world? Nothing, she would hasten to assure herself, it was the best of all possible worlds, and she, a darling of fortune--once, unforgetably, the waif of chance--was the most contented of women. Only--what was the matter with this perversely empty and uninteresting world? It was not always so. It was once invested with wonderful things, and such simple things, too. She remembered how she used to stand at the window of her little work-room watching the day fade, marveling at the miracle of the twilight. While the sun was high, she had seen only commonplace, dusty streets, crowded with people, and had heard only a crazy, creaking old piano-organ grinding away on the pavement beneath, but in the soft indefiniteness of twilight these solid houses and buildings would become unsubstantial, mere shadowy arabesques on the spangled gloom of night. There were purple vistas, glittering lights and fairy towers. She would hold her breath, almost expecting to hear a nightingale. It was all mystery and magic, life and romance, that eternal romance her starved youth asked. How she used to dream of the unexpected, the dazzling unexpected! And then Cresswell had come, and, as she thought, offered it to her. To do Perdita justice, she had not married Hepworth merely because of his great wealth. She was incapable of such sordid and callous calculation. But Cophetua had met this beggar maid at her most disheartened and despairing moment, and without difficulty had succeeded in first winning her interest and then enchaining her imagination.