ell
Spence, was part and parcel of its permanence. The life relationships of
the people by whom she was surrounded became her own. She had little time
for thought--during the week.

We are dealing, now, in emotions as delicate as cloud shadows, and these
drew on as Saturday approached. On Saturdays and Sundays the quality and
texture of life seemed to undergo a change. Who does not recall the
Monday mornings of the school days of youth, and the indefinite feeling
betwixt sleep and waking that to-day would not be as yesterday or the day
before? On Saturday mornings, when she went downstairs, she was wont to
find the porch littered with newspapers and her husband lounging in a
wicker chair behind the disapproving lilacs. Although they had long
ceased to bloom, their colour was purple--his was pink.

Honora did not at first analyze or define these emotions, and was
conscious only of a stirring within her, and a change. Reality became
unreality. The house in which she lived, and for which she felt a passion
of ownership, was for two days a rented house. Other women in Newport had
week-end guests in the guise of husbands, and some of them went so far as
to bewail the fact. Some had got rid of them. Honora kissed hers
dutifully, and picked up the newspapers, drove him to the beach, and took
him out to dinner, where he talked oracularly of finance. On Sunday night
he departed, without visible regrets, for New York.

One Monday morning a storm was raging over Newport. Seized by a sudden
whim, she rang her bell, breakfasted at an unusual hour, and nine o'clock
found her, with her skirts flying, on the road above the cliffs that
leads to the Fort. The wind had increased to a gale, and as she stood on
the rocks the harbour below her was full of tossing white yachts
straining at their anchors. Serene in the midst of all this hubbub lay a
great grey battleship.

Presently, however, her thoughts were distracted by the sight of
something moving rapidly across her line of vision. A sloop yacht, with a
ridiculously shortened sail, was coming in from the Narrows, scudding
before the wind like a frightened bird. She watched its approach in a
sort of fascination, for of late she had been upon the water enough to
realize that the feat of which she was witness was not without its
difficulties. As the sloop drew nearer she made out a bare-headed figure
bent tensely at the wheel, and four others clinging to the yellow deck.
In a flash the