nly watered and fed and warmed, and who become
--distorted."
"It's extraordinary," replied Chiltern, slowly, "that you should say this
to me. It is what I have come to believe, but I couldn't have said it
half so well."
Mrs. Grainger gave the signal to rise. Honora took Chiltern's arm, and he
led her back to the drawing-room. She was standing alone by the fire when
Mrs. Maitland approached her.
"Haven't I seen you before?" she asked.
CHAPTER III
VINELAND
It was a pleasant Newport to which Honora went early in June, a fair city
shining in the midst of summer seas, a place to light the fires of
imagination. It wore at once an air of age, and of a new and sparkling
unreality. Honora found in the very atmosphere a certain magic which she
did not try to define, but to the enjoyment of which she abandoned
herself; and in those first days after her arrival she took a sheer
delight in driving about the island. Narrow Thames Street, crowded with
gay carriages, with its aspect of the eighteenth and it shops of the
twentieth century; the whiffs of the sea; Bellevue Avenue, with its
glorious serried ranks of trees, its erring perfumes from bright gardens,
its massed flowering shrubs beckoning the eye, its lawns of a truly
enchanted green. Through tree and hedge, as she drove, came ever changing
glimpses of gleaming palace fronts; glimpses that made her turn and look
again; that stimulated but did not satisfy, and left a pleasant longing
for something on the seeming verge of fulfilment.
The very stillness and solitude that seemed to envelop these palaces
suggested the enchanter's wand. To-morrow, perhaps, the perfect lawns
where the robins hopped amidst the shrubbery would become again the
rock-bound, windswept New England pasture above the sea, and screaming
gulls circle where now the swallows hovered about the steep blue roof of
a French chateau. Hundreds of years hence, would these great pleasure
houses still be standing behind their screens and walls and hedges? or
would, indeed, the shattered, vine-covered marble of a balustrade alone
mark the crumbling terraces whence once the fabled owners scanned the
sparkling waters of the ocean? Who could say?
The onward rush of our story between its canon walls compels us
reluctantly to skip the narrative of the winter conquests of the lady who
is our heroine. Popularity had not spoiled her, and the best proof of
this lay in the comments of a world that is nothing
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