Read "Sink or Swim? , Volume I" by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Many gentlemen, as I have just said -- gentlemen, that is, by brevet and / by prescriptive right -- made themselves conspicuous that day by their / open and undisguised admiration for John Beacham's beautiful wife. Honor / was, unfortunately, precisely in the position which of all others / renders a young woman the most easy to be beset by this indelicate / description of flattery. There is something in the very name of a / "horse-breeder's wife" which at once connects itself in the mind with / what is as "fast" and "slangy" and forward as the most fast and free and / horsey among the "fine young English ladies" of our day. Those who / chanced to know Honor personally might have proclaimed the contrary; but / somehow young men in general do not care much to assert that a beautiful / girl with whom they are acquainted has betrayed the reverse of the / proclivities above alluded to; so, for lack of a champion, those who / were not acquainted with Mrs. John Beacham judged of that young woman as / it pleased them best.
Amongst the class of "gentlemen" above alluded to -- _messieurs qui / suivent les femmes_ from rule, from habit, and from inclination -- the one / that stared the most at, and followed the closest on, Honor's footsteps / was the individual with whom the reader has already made some slight / acquaintance in his character of owner of that celebrated yearling / yclept Rough Diamond.