Read "Diana Tempest, Volume II" by Mary Cholmondeley online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"The fact is, I have never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It _is_ a noose, you know. " -- GEORGE ELIOT.
It was the middle of July. The season had reached the climax which precedes a collapse. The heat was intense. The pace had been too great to last. The rich sane were already on their way to Scotch moor or Norwegian river; the rich insane and the poor remained, and people with daughters -- assiduously entertaining the dwindling numbers of the "uncertain, coy, and hard to please" _jeunesse doree_ of the present day. There were some great weddings fixed for the end of July, proving that marriage was not extinct, -- prospective weddings which, like iron rivets, held the crumbling fabric of the season together.