d, slipping her arm through that of her
friend, "for as long as you will let me stay."

And she left a note for Howard to that effect.

BOOK III.

Volume 5.

CHAPTER I. ASCENDI.

Honora did not go back to Quicksands. Neither, in this modern chronicle,
shall we.

The sphere we have left, which we know is sordid, sometimes shines
in the retrospect. And there came a time, after the excitement of
furnishing the new house was over, when our heroine, as it were, swung
for a time in space: not for a very long time; that month, perhaps,
between autumn and winter.

We need not be worried about her, though we may pause for a moment or
two to sympathize with her in her loneliness--or rather in the moods it
produced. She even felt, in those days, slightly akin to the Lady of
the Victoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enough
occasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with
an expression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes four
times a day.

Sympathy! We have seen Honora surrounded by friends--what has become of
them? Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of
the most desirable houses in New York. What more could be wished for? To
jump at conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a
heroine with an Ideal. She had these things, and--strange as it may
seem--suffered.

Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especially
beautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it was
not taste. Honora sat in it and wondered: wondered, as she looked back
over the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal,
whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn. The
farther she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land
of unrealities. The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and
which she had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not
have been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a
scene in a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them. They did
not belong to her, nor she to them.

Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified in
looking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own:
and children's children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carved
stone mantel. The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats might
appropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet.