Sink or swim?

The merrie month of May was speeding onward, and with it--fast and furious--rattling over stones, and dashing over impediments, ran the fierce strong current of “London life.” There is an intoxicating influence, especially on the inexperienced, in the rapid motion, the ever-changing aspect of pleasure, the atmosphere redolent of poisonous influences, that is breathed by the upper ten thousand in the month of May, in busy, half-mad London. By none was this insidious influence more perilously undergone than by the impressionable, weak-nerved woman who, through her own folly, considerably aided by “circumstances over which she had no control,” was standing on the very brink of the abyss, the name of which is “ruin.”

It was now the middle of May, and during a swiftly-passing fortnight Honor Beacham, continuing her course of semi-deception regarding her father’s condition, and entirely concealing from the husband whom she believed to be exclusively absorbed in his own pursuits and interests the fact that her days and nights were spent in one continued round of exciting pleasure, went on her way--if not rejoicing, at least in a condition of such delightful mental inebriation, that she found barely sense or time enough to ask herself the serious question, if the life which she was leading indeed were joy.

John’s answer to her letter, written under the influence of hurt feeling, and penned by a man utterly destitute, not only of the art to make a thing appear the thing it is not, but of l’eloquence du billet in general, was one exactly calculated to rouse in a high-spirited nature a dormant inclination to rebel. In it there was an implied right to command, a right solely arrogated (to Honor’s thinking) by reason of the writer’s indifference to her proceedings, and scanty appreciation of her merits. “You will come back, I suppose,”--so wrote the unwise man, who, on his side, had so egregiously erred in his estimate of character,--“you will come back when you have had enough of London. I don’t say to you, ‘come home,’ for women that are made to do the thing they don’t like are, as mother says, not over and above pleasant in a house. We are uncommon busy, too, just now; there is painting to be done, and the chintz to be calendered, so perhaps you are as well out of the way of the bother.”

Poor John! Could Honor have heard the heavy sigh that broke from his full heart as he closed the letter; could she, above all, have looked into that heart and read its secret sorrows, she could not have doubted of her husband’s love; and perhaps, removed from the glamour of Arthur Vavasour’s presence, from the mesmeric influence of a passion which was becoming terribly overpowering in its hourly-gathering strength, she might have been again a happy woman in the simple fashion and the humble sphere to which she had been brought up. Such a “chance,” however, was not for the foolish, beautiful woman who, with half-tender words (for, alas, it had come to that) from her high-bred adorer lingering on her memory, read the simple letter, which it had cost so much pain to write, in anger and in bitterness. Tossing it on her toilet-table with an impatient jerk, she told herself that John did not care for her. It was nothing to him, she said mentally, whether she stayed away or not; but as she inly spoke the words, the fingers of her little gauntleted hand--she had just returned from riding in the Park--dashed away something very like tears that had gathered on her long lashes and nothing short of the recollection that she was going in a few hours’ time to dine at Richmond with Arthur Vavasour and a few other friends of her father’s prevented her (for it would be dreadful to make her appearance with red eyes) from indulging in the luxury of a “good cry.”