Chapter 25 - Page 2

stimulating, and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in
the garden, playing Patience, embroidering, or reading odd volumes of
Tauchnitz. Undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel
book-shelves, discovered that scarcely any work they contained was
complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to
feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally
raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping
the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The inmates of the hotel
were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were
levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue,
of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of
insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs
and pass-words of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the
heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel where the lack of
any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified
dulness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the
voluntary ignorance of any others.

It took Undine a long time to accustom herself to such an atmosphere,
and meanwhile she fretted, fumed and flaunted, or abandoned herself to
long periods of fruitless brooding. Sometimes a flame of anger shot up
in her, dismally illuminating the path she had travelled and the blank
wall to which it led. At other moments past and present were enveloped
in a dull fog of rancour which distorted and faded even the image she
presented to her morning mirror. There were days when every young face
she saw left in her a taste of poison. But when she compared herself
with the specimens of her sex who plied their languid industries under
the palms, or looked away as she passed them in hall or staircase, her
spirits rose, and she rang for her maid and dressed herself in her
newest and vividest. These were unprofitable triumphs, however. She
never made one of her attacks on the organized disapproval of the
community without feeling she had lost ground by it; and the next day
she would lie in bed and send down capricious orders for food, which her
maid would presently remove untouched, with instructions to transmit her
complaints to the landlord.

Sometimes the events of the past year, ceaselessly revolving through her
brain, became no longer a subject for criticism or justification but
simply a series of pictures monotonously unrolled. Hour by hour, in such
moods, she re-lived the incidents of her flight with Peter Van Degen:
the part of her career that, since it had proved a failure, seemed least
like herself and most difficult to justify. She had gone away with him,
and had lived with him for