as yesterday or the
day before? On Saturday mornings, when she went downstairs, she was wont
to find the porch littered with newspapers and her husband lounging in
a wicker chair behind the disapproving lilacs. Although they had long
ceased to bloom, their colour was purple--his was pink.

Honora did not at first analyze or define these emotions, and was
conscious only of a stirring within her, and a change. Reality became
unreality. The house in which she lived, and for which she felt a
passion of ownership, was for two days a rented house. Other women in
Newport had week-end guests in the guise of husbands, and some of them
went so far as to bewail the fact. Some had got rid of them. Honora
kissed hers dutifully, and picked up the newspapers, drove him to
the beach, and took him out to dinner, where he talked oracularly of
finance. On Sunday night he departed, without visible regrets, for New
York.

One Monday morning a storm was raging over Newport. Seized by a sudden
whim, she rang her bell, breakfasted at an unusual hour, and nine
o'clock found her, with her skirts flying, on the road above the cliffs
that leads to the Fort. The wind had increased to a gale, and as she
stood on the rocks the harbour below her was full of tossing white
yachts straining at their anchors. Serene in the midst of all this
hubbub lay a great grey battleship.

Presently, however, her thoughts were distracted by the sight of
something moving rapidly across her line of vision. A sloop yacht, with
a ridiculously shortened sail, was coming in from the Narrows, scudding
before the wind like a frightened bird. She watched its approach in a
sort of fascination, for of late she had been upon the water enough
to realize that the feat of which she was witness was not without its
difficulties. As the sloop drew nearer she made out a bare-headed figure
bent tensely at the wheel, and four others clinging to the yellow deck.
In a flash the boat had rounded to, the mainsail fell, and a veil of
spray hid the actors of her drama. When it cleared the yacht was tugging
like a wild thing at its anchor.

That night was Mrs. Grenfell's ball, and many times in later years has
the scene come back to Honora. It was not a large ball, by no means on
the scale of Mr. Chamberlin's, for instance. The great room reminded one
of the gallery of a royal French chateau, with its dished ceiling, in
the oval of which the colours of a pastoral fresco glowed in the ruby