’Miss Honora Sneyd would not admit the unqualified control of a husband over all her actions.  She did not feel that seclusion from society was indispensably necessary to preserve female virtue, or to secure domestic happiness.  Upon terms of reasonable equality she supposed that mutual confidence might best subsist.  She said that, as Mr. Day had decidedly declared his determination to live in perfect seclusion from what is usually called the world, it was fit she should decidedly declare that she would not change her present mode of life, with which she had no reason to be dissatisfied, for any dark and untried system that could be proposed to her. . . .  One restraint, which had acted long and steadily upon my feelings, was now removed; my friend was no longer attached to Miss Honora Sneyd.  My former admiration of her returned with unabated ardour. . . .  This admiration was unknown to everybody but Mr. Day; ... he represented to me the danger, the criminality of such an attachment; I knew that there is but one certain method of escaping such dangers —­flight.  I resolved to go abroad.’

CHAPTER 3

Mr. Day and Edgeworth went to France, and the latter spent nearly two years at Lyons, where his wife joined him.  Here he found interest and occupation in some engineering works by which the course of the Rhone was to be diverted and some land gained to enlarge the city, which lies hemmed in between the Rhone and the Saone.  When the works were nearly completed, an old boatman warned Edgeworth ’that a tremendous flood might be expected in ten days from the mountains of Savoy.  I represented this to the company, and proposed to employ more men, and to engage, by increased wages, those who were already at work, to continue every day till it was dark, but I could not persuade them to a sudden increase of their expenditure. . . .  At five or six o’clock one morning, I was awakened by a prodigious noise on the ramparts under my windows.  I sprang out of bed, and saw numbers of people rushing towards the Rhone.  I foreboded the disaster! dressed myself, and hastened to the river. . .  When I reached the Rhone, I beheld a tremendous sight!  All the work of several weeks, carried on daily by nearly a hundred men, had been swept away.  Piles, timber, barrows, tools, and large parts of expensive machinery were all carried down the torrent, and thrown in broken pieces upon the banks.  The principal part of the machinery had been erected upon an island opposite the rampart; here there still remained some valuable timber and engines, which might, probably, be saved by immediate exertion.  The old boatman, whom I have mentioned before, was at the water-side; I asked him to row me over to the island, that I might give orders how to preserve what remained belonging to the company.  My old friend, the boatman, represented to me, with great kindness, the imminent danger to which I should expose myself.  “Sir,” he added, “the best swimmer in Lyons, unless he were one of the Rhone-men, could not save himself if the boat overset, and you cannot swim at all.”