Sink or Swim? , Volume I

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.