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 procession there.  The colour, the movement, the sensation of living in a world where every one was fabulously wealthy, was at once a stimulation and a despair.  Brougham after brougham passed, victoria after victoria, in which beautifully gowned women chatted gayly or sat back, impassive, amidst the cushions.  Some of them, indeed, looked bored, but this did not mar the general effect of pleasure and prosperity.  Even the people—­well-dressed, too—­in the hansom cabs were usually animated and smiling.  On the sidewalk athletic, clear-skinned girls passed her, sometimes with a man, sometimes in groups of two and three, going in and out of the expensive-looking shops with the large, plate-glass windows.