It was then afternoon, and she was passing through a village by a lake.  Since Grizel’s time monster hotels have trampled the village to death, and the shuddering lake reflects all day the most hideous of caravansaries flung together as with a giant shovel in one of the loveliest spots on earth.  Even then some of the hotels had found it out.  Grizel drew near to two of them, and saw wet halls full of open umbrellas which covered the floor and looked like great beetles.  These buildings were too formidable, and she dragged herself past them.  She came to a garden of hops and evergreens.  Wet chairs were standing in the deserted walks, and here and there was a little arbour.  She went into one of these arbours and sat down, and soon slid to the floor.

The place was St. Gian, some miles from Bad-Platten; but one of the umbrellas she had seen was Tommy’s.  Others belonged to Mrs. Jerry and Lady Pippinworth.

CHAPTER XXVIII

TWO OF THEM

When Tommy started impulsively on what proved to be his only Continental trip he had expected to join Mrs. Jerry and her stepdaughter at Bad-Platten.  They had been there for a fortnight, and “the place is a dream,” Mrs. Jerry had said in the letter pressing him to come; but it was at St. Gian that she met the diligence and told him to descend.  Bad-Platten, she explained, was a horror.

Her fuller explanation was that she was becoming known there as the round lady.

“Now, am I as round as all that?” she said plaintively to Tommy.

“Mrs. Jerry,” he replied, with emotion, “you must not ask me what I think of you.”  He always treated her with extraordinary respect and chivalry now, and it awed her.

She had looked too, too round because she was in the company of Lady Pippinworth.  Everyone seemed to be too round or too large by the side of that gifted lady, who somehow never looked too thin.  She knew her power.  When there were women in the room whom she disliked she merely went and stood beside them.  In the gyrations of the dance the onlooker would momentarily lose sight of her; she came and went like a blinking candle.  Men could not dance with her without its being said that they were getting stout.  There is nothing they dislike so much, yet they did dance with her.  Tommy, having some slight reason, was particularly sensitive about references to his figure, yet it was Lady Pippinworth who had drawn him to Switzerland.  What was her strange attraction?

Calmly considered, she was preposterously thin, but men, at least, could not think merely of her thinness, unless, when walking with her, they became fascinated by its shadow on the ground.  She was tall, and had a very clear, pale complexion and light-brown hair.  Light brown, too, were her heavy eyelashes, which were famous for being black-tipped, as if a brush had touched them, though it had not.  She made play with her eyelashes as with a fan, and sometimes the upper and lower seemed to entangle for a moment and be in difficulties, from which you wanted to extricate them in the tenderest manner.  And the more you wanted to help her the more disdainfully she looked at you.  Yet though she looked disdainful she also looked helpless.  Now we have the secret of her charm.