Henrietta paid her father a visit before they started abroad. The promise of the first days was amply fulfilled; the whole house was happy, and Henrietta was touched by the warmth of her welcome. After the squalor of lodgings home was pleasant, and her father’s invitation was cordial: “Henrietta, why don’t you stay with us? Mildred,” with a fond look at his wife, “never will allow your room to be used; it’s always ready waiting for you.”

It was a temptation to Henrietta, but she refused partly from pride, from a feeling that she ought not to disturb the present comfort, but also because it was getting a principle with her, as apparently with many middle-aged Englishwoman, that she must always be going abroad. Yet she knew that Miss Gurney did not particularly want to have her, and had invited her more from laziness than from anything else.

They went abroad it was to the Italian Lakes and a life of sitting in the sun, walking up and down promenades, short drives, and making and unmaking of desultory friendships began. They grumbled a good deal to third parties, but still they were happy enough, according to their low standard of happiness.

As they were abroad for an indefinite period, there was none of the feeling of rush, which they had enjoyed so much before, but sometimes they played the Italian game, and had packed-in days; called, 6.45; coffee, 7.30; train, 8.21; arrive at destination, 11.23; go to Croce d’Oro for coffee, visit churches of Santa Maria and San Giovanni, and museum: table d’hote luncheon, 1.30; drive to Roman remains, back to Croce d’Oro for tea; separate for shopping and meet at station, 5.20, for train, 5.30; back for special table d’hote kept for them in the salle a manger. Henrietta would settle it all with Baedeker and the railway guide the night before, and if she had felt apprehension at her failing powers in history, her grasp of this kind of day could not have been bettered. Everything was seen and everything was timed, and the only person who might have something to complain of, was the delicate niece, who went through her treat too exhausted to open her mouth, counting the hours when she might go to her bed in peace.

At last Miss Gurney and the niece decided to return to England. Henrietta found some Americans who wanted to stay at Montreux, and they asked her to join them. After Montreux came Chamounix, and in the autumn Miss Gurney’s niece came out again, and she and Henrietta stayed at Como, and then at Mentone till April. Then came Switzerland again. Then Henrietta went to England for a round of visits, and by the end of them she was longing to be back abroad. She said that England was depressing, and gave her rheumatism, and that she (in the best of health and prime of life) could not face an English winter. The fact was she did not care for the sharing of other people’s lives which is expected from a visitor, and her long sojourn in hotels with no one but herself to consider, had made her less easy to live with. So without exactly knowing how, she drifted into spending almost all her time abroad. Every other year she came back for visits in the summer, but in the spring, autumn, and winter she wandered from one cheap pension to another in Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland.

If she had led a half-occupied life as keeper of her father’s house, she now learnt the art of getting through a day in which she did absolutely nothing. When she became accustomed to it, the very smallest service required of her was regarded as a cross. Sometimes a relation would commission her to buy something abroad, and then the salle a manger would resound with wails, because she must go round the corner, select an article, and give orders to the shopman to despatch it to England. The friends who asked her to engage rooms for them at an hotel, had cause to rue their request; they never heard the end of it.

Many lonely women receive great solace from their church, and give solace in return. Where would the church and the poor be without them? But Henrietta was never long enough in her caravanserais to become attached to the services of the chaplains in the salle a manger, and she soon gave up churchgoing. At first she spent a great deal of time inventing reasons to keep her conscience quiet, such as that it had rained in the night and therefore might rain again, or that she did not approve of chanting Amen, but later she did not see why there should be a reason, and left her conscious to its remorse.

Bad health is another resource for unoccupied women, and it certainly occurred to her as an occupation, but she realized that it and roving cannot be combined, and of the two she preferred roving.

Her chief pastime was to skim through novels, any novels that could be found, costume novels of English history by preference. This was how her bent for learning satisfied itself. She never remembered the author, or title, or anything of what she read, but at the same time she was obsessed with the idea that she must always have something new, and would constantly accuse her friends, or the library, of deceiving her with books she had read before. “If you can’t remember, what does it matter?” her dreadfully reasonable nieces would exclaim, not realizing that her sole interest in the novels was the collector’s interest of seeing how many new ones she could find.

A second pastime was her patience, that bond which knits together our occidental civilization. She was always learning new patiences, and always mixing them up with one another. This was another source of annoyance to efficient nieces. “But that is not demon, Aunt Etta,” they would explain, playing patience severely from a sense of duty. She cheated so persistently that there was no room for skill. “I can’t conceive why you play,” they said crossly. But the reason was perfectly clear. It stared one in the face. During the patience the clock had moved from ten minutes past eight to twenty-five minutes to ten.

Henrietta also killed time now and then with sights; not churches or old pictures, of course she never went near masterpieces now she had ample leisure for seeing them, but Easter services, royal birthday processions, or battles of flowers. As she seldom broke her routine of idleness, these occasions excited her, not with pleasurable anticipation, but with a nervous fluster that she might somehow miss something; and the concierge, the porter, Madame, and the head-waiter, would all be flying about the hotel half an hour before it was necessary for her to start, sent on some perfectly useless errand connected with her outing. If it rained, if something went wrong, how she grumbled. And when she did see her show, it gave her very little pleasure. She had not in the least a child’s mind; she was not pleased by small events, yet she grasped desperately after them, with an absurd, hazy idea that she was defrauded of her rights, if she did not see them.

Another interest was an enormous collection of photographs of places, which she had not cared for at the time, and could not in the least remember; another her address-book of pensions and hotels, to which she was always adding new volumes; above all, grumbling. Favourite subjects were her kettle and her methylated spirits, whether the hotel would allow her to take up milk and sugar from breakfast, whether the chambermaid abstracted the biscuits she brought from dessert overnight. Everyone who came in contact with Miss Symons found they were made to listen to an endless story of a certain Elise who had stolen the biscuits and substituted other ones that were quite four days old, and of Elise’s brazen behaviour when charged with the offence.

Her standard of comfort at a hotel was so impossible that she became an object of terror and dislike to the waiters and chambermaids. She was punctual in payment, but very grasping, and wrung many concessions from the hotels by a persistence which no men and few women would have had the courage to display. She was always seeking the ideal hotel, and for this reason she was always wandering, and never was long enough in one place to strike any roots and create a feeling of home. This life corroded her character. She became more bad-tempered and nagging, always up in arms, scenting out liberties, and thinking she was taken advantage of. She was not a character which does well by itself, and under a domineering manner she concealed her weakness, vacillation, and timidity. She was divorced from every duty, every responsibility, every natural tie, with no outlet for her interest or her sympathy. It seems inconceivable that she should willingly have led such an existence. She was however, much more satisfied with herself and with things in general, than she had formerly been. She did not have stormy repentances or outbursts against her lot; she no longer desired what was unattainable. If she did not have a particularly high standard of happiness or of character, neither, in her opinion, had the rest of the world. Not that she thought much of these things. Over-thinking and over-longing had caused her much misery in early life, and she shrank from opening all those wounds again. She faced facts as little as she could. She lived from day to day, and her inner self was really very much what her outer self seemed, absorbed in the very small round of events which concerned her. The days passed, the months passed, the years passed. She saw them go unregretted, and when they were gone, she did not remember them. Nothing had happened in them, bad or good, to mark their course.

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form, in moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”