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Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 5

Author: Winston Churchill

Release Date: October 19, 2004 [EBook #5378]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN CHRONICLE, VOLUME 5 ***

Produced by David Widger

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

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