The Pupil by Henry James

A year after he had come to live with them Mr. and Mrs. Moreen suddenly gave up the villa at Nice. Pemberton had got used to suddenness, having seen it practised on a considerable scale during two jerky little tours -- one in Switzerland the first summer, and the other late in the winter, when they all ran down to Florence and then, at the end of ten days, liking it much less than they had intended, straggled back in mysterious depression. They had returned to Nice "for ever," as they said; but this didn't prevent their squeezing, one rainy muggy May night, into a second-class railway-carriage -- you could never tell by which class they would travel -- where Pemberton helped them to stow away a wonderful collection of bundles and bags.

The explanation of this manoeuvre was that they had determined to spend the summer "in some bracing place"; but in Paris they dropped into a small furnished apartment -- a fourth floor in a third-rate avenue, where there was a smell on the staircase and the portier was hateful -- and passed the next four months in blank indigence.