In the drawing-room to-night an old and solitary, but blandly cheerful, female wanderer recounted numerous accidents at St. Moritz: legs broken in two places, shoulders broken, spines injured; also deaths. Further, the danger of catching infectious diseases at St. Moritz. “One very large hotel, where everybody had influenza,” etc. These recitals seemed to give her calm and serious pleasure.

“Do you think this place is good for nerves?” she broke out suddenly at me. I told her that in my opinion a hot bath and a day in bed would make any place good for nerves. “I mean the nerves of the body,” she said inscrutably. Then she deviated into a long set description of the historic attack of Russian influenza which she had had several years ago, and which had kept her in bed for three months, since when she had’ never been the same woman. And she seemed to savour with placid joy the fact that she had never since been the same woman.

Then she flew back to St. Moritz and the prices thereof. She said you could get pretty reasonable terms, even there, “provided you didn’t mind going high up.” Upon my saying that I actually preferred being high up, she exclaimed: “I don’t. I’m so afraid of fire. I’m always afraid of fire.” She said that she had had two nephews at Cambridge. The second one took rooms at the top of the highest house in Cambridge, and the landlord was a drunkard. “My sister didn’t seem to care, but I didn’t know what to do! What could I do? Well, I bought him a. non-inflammable rope.” She smiled blandly.

This allusion to death and inebriety prompted a sprightly young Yorkshirewoman, with the country gift for yarn-spinning, to tell a tale of something that had happened to her cousin, who gave lessons in domestic economy at a London Board School. A little girl, absent for two days, was questioned as to the reason.

“I couldn’t come.”

“But why not?”

“I was kept.. . Please ‘m, my mother’s dead.”

“Well, wouldn’t you be better here at school? When did she die?”

“Yesterday. I must go back, please. I only came to tell you.”

“But why?”

“Well, ma’am. She’s lying on the table and I have to watch her.”

“Watch her?”

“Yes. Because when father comes home drunk, he knocks her off, and I have to put her on again.”

This narration startled even the bridge-players, and there were protests of horror. But the philosophic wanderer, who had never been the same woman since Russian influenza, smiled placidly.

“I knew something really much more awful than that,” she said. “A young woman, well-known to me, had charge of a crÈche of thirty infants, and one day she took it into her head to amuse herself by changing all their clothes, so that at night they could not be identified; and many of them never were identified! She was such a merry girl! I knew all her brothers and sisters too! She wanted to go into a sisterhood, and she did, for a month. But the only thing she did there—well, one day she went down into the laundry and taught all the laundry-maids to polka. She was such a merry girl!”

She smiled with extraordinary simplicity.

“In the end,” the bland wanderer continued, after a little pause, “she went to America. America is such an odd place! Once I got into a car at Philadelphia that had come from New York. The conductor showed me my berth. The bed was warm. I partly undressed and got into it, and drew the curtain. I was half asleep, when I felt a hand feeling me over through the curtain. I called out, and a man’s voice said: ‘It’s all right. I’m only looking for my stick. I think I must have left it in the berth’! Another time a lot of student girls were in the same car with me. They all got into their beds—or berths or whatever you call it—about eight o’clock, wearing fancy jackets, and they sat up and ate candy. I was walking up and down, and every time I passed they implored me to have candy, and then they implored each other to try to persuade me. They were mostly named Sadie. At one in the morning they ordered iced drinks ‘round. I was obliged to drink with them. They tired me out, and then made me drink. I don’t know what happened just after that, but I know that, at five in the morning, they were all sitting up and eating candy. I’ve travelled a good deal in America and it’s such an odd place! It was just the place for that young woman to go to.”