She pictured Paris as it would be on that very morning—­bright, clean, glittering; the neatness of the Rue Lord Byron, and the magnificent slanting splendour of the Champs Elysees.  Paris had always seemed beautiful to her; but the life of Paris had not seemed beautiful to her.  Yet now it did seem beautiful.  She could delve down into the earlier years of her ownership of the Pension, and see a regular, placid beauty in her daily life there.  Her life there, even so late as a fortnight ago, seemed beautiful; sad, but beautiful.  It had passed into history.  She sighed when she thought of the innumerable interviews with Mardon, the endless formalities required by the English and the French law and by the particularity of the Syndicate.  She had been through all that.  She had actually been through it and it was over.  She had bought the Pension for a song and sold it for great riches.  She had developed from a nobody into the desired of Syndicates.  And after long, long, monotonous, strenuous years of possession the day had come, the emotional moment had come, when she had yielded up the keys of ownership to Mr. Mardon and a man from the Hotel Moscow, and had paid her servants for the last time and signed the last receipted bill.  The men had been very gallant, and had requested her to stay in the Pension as their guest until she was ready to leave Paris.  But she had declined that.  She could not have borne to remain in the Pension under the reign of another.  She had left at once and gone to a hotel with her few goods while finally disposing of certain financial questions.  And one evening Jacqueline had come to see her, and had wept.

Her exit from the Pension Frensham struck her now as poignantly pathetic, in its quickness and its absence of ceremonial.  Ten steps, and her career was finished, closed.  Astonishing with what liquid tenderness she turned and looked back on that hard, fighting, exhausting life in Paris!  For, even if she had unconsciously liked it, she had never enjoyed it.  She had always compared France disadvantageously with England, always resented the French temperament in business, always been convinced that ‘you never knew where you were’ with French tradespeople.  And now they flitted before her endowed with a wondrous charm; so polite in their lying, so eager to spare your feelings and to reassure you, so neat and prim.  And the French shops, so exquisitely arranged!  Even a butcher’s shop in Paris was a pleasure to the eye, whereas the butcher’s shop in Wedgwood Street, which she remembered of old, and which she had glimpsed from the cab—­what a bloody shambles!  She longed for Paris again.  She longed to stretch her lungs in Paris.  These people in Bursley did not suspect what Paris was.  They did not appreciate and they never would appreciate the marvels that she had accomplished in a theatre of marvels.  They probably never realized that the whole of the rest of the world was not more or less like Bursley.  They had no curiosity.