Read "Sink or Swim? , Volume II" by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Honor Beacham was, as I think has been pretty clearly shown, a very / woman in her faults and follies -- her quick impulses -- her yearning for / love and admiration -- her small ambitions -- and her dainty phantasies. / "Fine by degrees, and delicately weak" -- like Pope's inferior man -- this / semi-Celtic woman was evidently no philosopher at all; and, left to her / own guidance, the chances were terribly in favour of her coming -- to use / the not inexpressive nineteenth-century slang -- "to grief."
How long those exquisite blue eyes of hers would have betrayed tokens of / sorrow, had they not been quickly dried by a double-knock at the door of / No. 14, must ever remain a problem. To be seen with red eyelids is an / act of _lèse_ loveliness, which Honor would never, could she avoid it, / have been guilty of committing. Her little coquettish veil, too, was / ready at hand to hide any traces of past emotion that might have been / visible on her countenance; so that Mrs. Norcott, who entered the room / trippingly, and with the attempt at juvenile grace peculiar to that / colonial lady of forty-two, saw no reason to suppose that her country / guest was otherwise than cheerfully and contentedly disposed.