Sink or Swim? , Volume II

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.