He had bought _Punch_ and other comic journals at the station, and spread them out before his wife--as an intellectual feast. The breezy drive over the downs had revived her beauty a little. The eyelids had lost their red swollen look, but she was still very pale, and there was a nervous quiver of the lips now and then which betokened a tendency to hysteria. She sat at the open window, looking away towards those vanishing hills. A moment, and the tufted crest of St. Catherine's had gone--the low-lying meadows--the winding stream--the cathedral's stunted tower--it was all gone, like a dream. 'Dreadful hole of a place,' said Brian, contemptuously; 'a comfortably feathered old nest for rooks and parsons and ancient spinsters, but a dungeon for anybody else.' 'I think it is the dearest old city in the world.' 'Old enough, and dear enough, in all conscience,' answered Brian. 'My uncle's tailor had the audacity to charge me thirty shillings for a waistcoat. But it's the most deadly-lively place I know. All country towns are deadly-lively; in fact, there are only two places fit for young people to live in--London and Paris!' 'I suppose you mean to live in London?' said Ida, listlessly. She did not feel as if she were personally interested in the matter. If she were forced to live with a man she despised, the place of her habitation would matter very little. 'I mean to oscillate between the two,' answered Brian. 'Were you ever in Paris?' 'Never.' 'I envy you. You have something left to live for--a new sensation--a new birth. We will go there in November.' He looked for a smile, an expression of pleasure, but there was none. His wife's face was still turned towards the landscape, her sad eyes still fixed on the vanishing hills--no longer those familiar hill-tops around the cathedral city, but like them in character. Soon the last of those chalky ridges would vanish, and then would come the heathy tracts about Woking, and the fertile meads in the Thames valley. The train stopped for five minutes at Basingstoke, and Brian offered his wife tea, lemonade, anything which the refreshment-room could produce, but she declined everything. 'We two have not broken bread together since we were one,' he said, still struggling after liveliness; 'let us eat something together, if it be only a Bath bun.' 'I am not hungry, thanks,' she answered listlessly. 'Papers! papers!' shouted the small imp attached to the bookstall. 'Morning paper--_Times, Standard, Telegraph, Daily News, Morning Post!_' Brian drew up the window abruptly, as if he had seen a scorpion.