Rivington called upon Honora in vehicles of all descriptions, in proportion to the improvidence or prosperity of the owners.  And Honora returned the calls, and joined the Sewing Circle, and the Woman’s Luncheon Club, which met for the purpose of literary discussion.  In the evenings there were little dinners of six or eight, where the men talked business and the women house rent and groceries and gossip and the cheapest places in New York City to buy articles of the latest fashion.  Some of them had actually built or were building houses that cost as much as thirty thousand dollars, with the inexplicable intention of remaining in Rivington the rest of their lives!

Honora was kind to these ladies.  As we know, she was kind to everybody.  She almost allowed two or three of them to hope that they might become her intimates, and made excursions to New York with them, and lunched in fashionable restaurants.  Their range of discussion included babies and Robert Browning, the modern novel and the best matinee.  It would be interesting to know why she treated them, on the whole, like travellers met by chance in a railroad station, from whom she was presently 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.