orous old husband, and never thought
or cared what was to become of her abandoned sister. She could only
think of her own exciting affairs.

Partly they were unsatisfactory, no doubt. All her rights were not hers
even now--no, not by a long way. But oh, how much better was this than
the drab and shabby and barren existence for ever left behind! She was
bound, indeed; yet she was free--freer than another might have been in
her place, and far, far less bound. One must expect to pay some tax to
Fortune for such extraordinary gifts, and Frances was not the one to
pay it in heart's blood. She was philosophically prepared to pay it in
her own coin, and be done with it, and then give herself to the
enjoyment of the pleasures of her lot.

Her first enjoyment was in her beautiful going-away dress--grey cloth
and chinchilla fur, with flushes of pink as delicate as the rose of her
cheeks--and in her knowledge of the effect she made in that dream of a
costume. There was no hiding her light under a bushel any more. The
highway, and the middle of it, for her now--her proud husband strutting
there beside her--and every passer-by turning to look at and to admire
her. There was joy in the occupancy of the best suite of rooms in the
best hotel at every place she stopped at during her gay and well-filled
bridal holiday; joy in the dainty meals--so long unknown; in the
obsequious servants, in the plentiful theatres, in the ever-ready
carriage that took her to them, in the having one's hair done to
perfection by an expert maid, in sweeping forth with one's silks and
laces trailing, and one's diamonds on. These were the delights for
which her little soul had so long yearned; she now pursued them
greedily. She could not rest if she were not doing something to display
herself and feed her craving for what is known as seeing the world. Her
husband was almost as obsequious as the servants--doubtless because
from the first she took the beauty's high hand with him, as well as the
attitude of the superior, naturally assumed by youth towards age--and
he enjoyed the sensation she made almost as much as she did. Visibly he
swelled and preened himself when his venerable contemporaries cast the
eye of surprise, not to say of envy, upon the conjunction of his
complacent figure and that of the bride who might have been his
grand-daughter; he toiled for that pleasure, and to make pleasure for
her, as no old gentleman should toil; he gave her everything sh