Read "Sink or Swim? , Volume III" by Matilda Charlotte Houstoun online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The merrie month of May was speeding onward, and with it -- fast and / furious -- rattling over stones, and dashing over impediments, ran the / fierce strong current of "London life. " There is an intoxicating / influence, especially on the inexperienced, in the rapid motion, the / ever-changing aspect of pleasure, the atmosphere redolent of poisonous / influences, that is breathed by the upper ten thousand in the month of / May, in busy, half-mad London. By none was this insidious influence more / perilously undergone than by the impressionable, weak-nerved woman who, / through her own folly, considerably aided by "circumstances over which / she had no control," was standing on the very brink of the abyss, the / name of which is "ruin."
It was now the middle of May, and during a swiftly-passing fortnight / Honor Beacham, continuing her course of semi-deception regarding her / father's condition, and entirely concealing from the husband whom she / believed to be exclusively absorbed in his own pursuits and interests / the fact that her days and nights were spent in one continued round of / exciting pleasure, went on her way -- if not rejoicing, at least in a / condition of such delightful mental inebriation, that she found barely / sense or time enough to ask herself the serious question, if the life / which she was leading indeed were joy.