nds in New York. Rivington and the Holt family (incongruous mixture)
formed the sum total of her acquaintance.

On Monday mornings in particular, if perchance she went to town, the
huge signs which she read across the swamps, of breakfast foods
and other necessaries, seemed, for some reason, best to express her
isolation. Well-dressed, laughing people descended from omnibuses at
the prettier stations, people who seemed all-sufficient to themselves;
people she was sure she should like if only she knew them. Once the
sight of her school friend, Ethel Wing, chatting with a tall young
man, brought up a flood of recollections; again, in a millinery
establishment, she came face to face with the attractive Mrs. Maitland
whom she had seen at Hot Springs. Sometimes she would walk on Fifth
Avenue, watching, with mingled sensations, the procession there. The
colour, the movement, the sensation of living in a world where every
one was fabulously wealthy, was at once a stimulation and a despair.
Brougham after brougham passed, victoria after victoria, in which
beautifully gowned women chatted gayly or sat back, impassive, amidst
the cushions. Some of them, indeed, looked bored, but this did not
mar the general effect of pleasure and prosperity. Even the
people--well-dressed, too--in the hansom cabs were usually animated
and smiling. On the sidewalk athletic, clear-skinned girls passed her,
sometimes with a man, sometimes in groups of two and three, going in and
out of the expensive-looking shops with the large, plate-glass windows.

All of these women, apparently, had something definite to do, somewhere
to go, some one to meet the very next, minute. They protested to
milliners and dressmakers if they were kept waiting, and even seemed
impatient of time lost if one by chance bumped into them. But Honora had
no imperative appointments. Lily Dallam was almost sure to be out, or
going out immediately, and seemed to have more engagements than any one
in New York.

"I'm so sorry, my dear," she would say, and add reproachfully: "why
didn't you telephone me you were coming? If you had only let me know we
might have lunched together or gone to the matinee. Now I have promised
Clara Trowbridge to go to a lunch party at her house."

Mrs. Dallam had a most convincing way of saying such things, and in
spite of one's self put one in the wrong for not having telephoned.
But if indeed Honora telephoned--as she did once or twice in her
innocence