This was not Bernardine's occupation: it was difficult to say what she
did with herself, for she had not yet followed Robert Allitsen's advice
and taken up some definite work: and the very fact that she had no such
wish, pointed probably to a state of health which forbade it. She,
naturally so keen and hard-working, was content to take what the hour
brought, and the hour brought various things: chess with the Swedish
professor, or Russian dominoes with the shrivelled-up little Polish
governess who always tried to cheat, and who clutched her tiny winnings
with precisely the same greediness shown by the Monte Carlo female
gamblers. Or the hour brought a stroll with the French danseuse and her
poodle, and a conversation about the mere trivialities of life, which a
year or two, or even a few months ago, Bernardine would have condemned
as beneath contempt, but, which were now taking their rightful place in
her new standard of importances. For some natures learn with greater
difficulty and after greater delay than others, that the real
importances of our existence are the nothingnesses of every-day life,
the nothingnesses which the philosopher in his study, reasoning about
and analysing human character, is apt to overlook; but which,
nevertheless, make him and every one else more of a human reality and
less of an abstraction.
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