Sink or Swim? , Volume III

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.