"This is a place to sleep and dream in," she says to her friend; "I want to see some life again. Let us go to Baden or Monaco."
Lady Etwynde is amazed.
"Will Sir Francis object?" she asks.
Lauraine smiles with faint contempt. "He never troubles himself about what I do," she says. "We will go, and if he objects, we can leave again!"
Lady Etwynde yields, and they go to Baden.
Lauraine seems now to have as great a horror of solitude as before she has had of gaiety. She is always out, always restless. No one they know of the fashionable world is at Baden, it being yet too early in the season. It is crowded with Germans and Austrians, and adventurers of all nationalities, who throng the pretty Kursaal under the shadow of the pine-crowned hills.
Lauraine makes numerous acquaintances, and is always inventing projects of amusements, such as picnics, excursions, jêtes, drives, and balls. She goes to concerts and theatres, she is one of the loungers in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal; she goes to supper-parties that to Lady Etwynde seem reckless and risqué, and meets all her friend's feeble remonstrances with the unanswerable argument that her husband does not mind, and therefore no one else need trouble their head about it.
She seems so horribly, unaccountably changed that it fills Lady Etwynde's mind with dread and pain.
Better the morbid grief, the dreary apathy of the past, than this feverish and unnatural gaiety, this craving for excitement and pleasure. Just as suddenly as she has gone to Baden, so suddenly does she tire of it. "She will go down the Rhine," she declares, "and stop anywhere that is pretty and picturesque." The change of programme delights her friend, and they leave their circle of new acquaintances desolate at their sudden departure.
The lovely scenery and the constant change seem for a while to quiet Lauraine's restlessness. She takes a fancy to Bingen, and stays there for a month; but it distresses Lady Etwynde to see how pale and thin she is getting, how weary and sleepless her eyes always look.