ntly forever
to depart. The time and manner of this departure were matters to be
determined in the future.

It would be interesting to know, likewise, just at what period the
intention of moving away from Rivington became fixed in Honora's mind.
Honora circumscribed, Honora limited, Honora admitting defeat, and this
chronicle would be finished. The gods exist somewhere, though many
incarnations may, be necessary to achieve their companionship. And no
prison walls loom so high as to appall our heroine's soul. To exchange
one prison for another is in itself something of a feat, and an argument
that the thing may be done again. Neither do the wise ones beat
themselves uselessly against brick or stone. Howard--poor man!--is
fatuous enough to regard a great problem as being settled once and for
all by a marriage certificate and a benediction; and labours under the
delusion that henceforth he may come and go as he pleases, eat his
breakfast in silence, sleep after dinner, and spend his Sundays at the
Rivington Golf Club. It is as well to leave him, at present, in blissful
ignorance of his future.

Our sympathies, however, must be with Honora, who has paid the price for
heaven, and who discovers that by marriage she has merely joined the
ranks of the Great Unattached. Hitherto it had been inconceivable to her
that any one sufficiently prosperous could live in a city, or near it and
dependent on it, without being socially a part of it. Most momentous of
disillusions! With the exception of the Sidney Dallams and one or two
young brokers who occasionally came out over Sunday, her husband had no
friends 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 proces