By mistake, I went by the Express train, and so was thrown into the society of a lady whose position would have rendered any acquaintance with her impossible, excepting under such chance-conditions as the present; and whose history, as I learned it afterwards, led me to reflect much on the difference between the reality and the seeming of life.

She moved my envy.  Yes—­base, mean, low, unartistic, degrading as is this passion, I felt it rise up like a snake in my breast when I saw that feeble woman.  She was splendidly dressed—­wrapped in furs of the most costly kind, trailing behind; her velvets and lace worth a countess’s dowry.  She was attended by obsequious menials; surrounded by luxuries; her compartment of the carriage was a perfect palace in all the accessories which it was possible to collect in so small a space; and it seemed as though ‘Cleopatra’s cup’ would have been no impracticable draught for her.  She gave me more fully the impression of luxury, than any person I had ever met with before; and I thought I had reason when I envied her.

She was lifted into the carriage carefully; carefully swathed in her splendid furs and lustrous velvets; and placed gently, like a wounded bird, in her warm nest of down.  But she moved languidly, and fretfully thrust aside her servants’ busy hands, indifferent to her comforts, and annoyed by her very blessings.  I looked into her face:  it was a strange face, which had once been beautiful; but ill-health, and care, and grief, had marked it now with deep lines, and coloured it with unnatural tints.  Tears had washed out the roses from her cheeks, and set large purple rings about her eyes; the mouth was hard and pinched, but the eyelids swollen; while the crossed wrinkles on her brow told the same tale of grief grown petulant, and of pain grown soured, as the thin lip, quivering and querulous, and the nervous hand, never still and never strong.

The train-bell rang, the whistle sounded, the lady’s servitors stood bareheaded and courtesying to the ground, and the rapid rush of the iron giant bore off the high-born dame and the starveling painter in strange companionship.  Unquiet and unresting—­now shifting her place—­now letting down the glass for the cold air to blow full upon her withered face—­then drawing it up, and chafing her hands and feet by the warm-water apparatus concealed in her chauffe-pied, while shivering as if in an ague-fit—­sighing deeply—­lost in thought—­wildly looking out and around for distraction—­she soon made me ask myself whether my envy of her was as true as deep sympathy and pity would have been.

‘But her wealth—­her wealth!’ I thought.  ’True she may suffer, but how gloriously she is solaced!  She may weep, but the angels of social life wipe off her tears with perfumed linen, gold embroidered; she may grieve, but her grief makes her joys so much the more blissful.  Ah! she is to be envied after all!—­envied, while I, a very beggar, might well scorn my place now!’