Before Mr. and Mrs. Carstairs had spent a week in Cannes the lady declared it to be a poky hole and wished she had gone to Nice. To Nice they accordingly repaired, and in due course of time sailed for Naples. While Mrs. Carstairs rattled and joked noisily with her other guests, she reserved for the handsome cad at whom Helen had taken special umbrage a reserve of manner more suspicious to an interested looker-on. To Helen, a petty agony of the cruise was that Mr. Danielson should conceive himself obliged to devote most of his leisure hours to attendance upon the owner’s daughter, refusing with fatuous persistency to be shaken off. A few brief scornful words of remonstrance on this subject, addressed to her stepmother, were met by the laughing assurance that there was really nothing for Helen to apprehend, and that a man so universally run after as was Mr. Danielson, by what Mrs. Carstairs called the "fair sex," must meet the risk of having his casual attentions misinterpreted at times.
Proud, wounded, scornful, feeling that her standard of life had dropped to an unendurable point, Helen got into the habit of keeping to herself as much as practicable. At Naples she would take her own maid and absent herself for hours from the yacht and its dubious company. To her father there was actually no chance of being what she had hoped. He was mostly captious, preferring to be left alone when his wife did not vouchsafe him her companionship—which was now a rare event. The great Mr. Carstairs was, indeed, socially a cipher among these half-breeds, who drank his wines and allowed him to pay their expenses of travel.
Miss Bleecker, under the infatuation of Mrs. Carstairs’ liberal money-spending, of their luxurious living and continual seeking of pleasure and excitement in which she was included when, as usual, Helen refused to go—became as a broken reed in support of her charge’s movements. Poor old Eulalie, with some sense of the loss of refined surroundings they had sustained, and a hearty dislike of the imperative chaperon, ranged herself exclusively upon the side of her young lady—refusing to fraternize with Mrs. Carstairs’ maid, whom she regarded as a second-rate creature in every way, and going through the routine of life in general with a dogged determination to endure unto the end.