The Intrusions of Peggy by Antonio Hope — Read

Mrs. Bonfill sore at the damage to her infallibility; Barmouth still feeling that rude and sacrilegious thrust at ennobled ribs; Lady Barmouth unable to look her neighbours in the face; Mervyn fearing the whispers and the titters; Lady Blixworth again wearily donning her armour, betaking herself to Barslett, goading Audrey Pollington into making herself attractive; the Glentorlys and a score more of exalted families feeling that they had been sadly 'let in,' treacherously beguiled into petting and patronising an impossible person; Airey Newton oppressed with scorn of himself, yet bound in his chains; Peggy persuaded that something must be done, and shaken out of her usual happiness by the difficulty of doing it -- all these people, and no doubt more besides, proved that if the world is not a football for every wanton toe, neither is it an immovable unimpressionable mass, on which individual effort and the vagaries of this man or that make absolutely no impression. Trix's raid had met with defeat, but it had left its effect on many lives, its marks in many quarters. A sense of this joined with the recognition of her own present wretched state to create in Trix the feelings with which she regarded her past proceedings and their outcome. So many people must have grudges against her; if she was not penitent she was frightened; her instinct was to hide, however much she might still hanker after the glories of conspicuous station. Of Airey's disturbance and of Peggy's fretting, indeed, she had only a vague inkling; the world she had left was the vivid thing to her; it seemed to ring with her iniquities as her guilty ears listened from the seclusion of Harriet Street, Covent Garden. She knew it called her impossible; she could not have resented Lord Glentorly's 'pirate craft.'

Not even on Mervyn himself had she been so great an influence as on Beaufort Chance, and, great as the influence was, Beaufort greatly, though not unnaturally, exaggerated it. He set down to her account all the guilt of those practices for which he had suffered and of which Fricker was in reality the chief inspirer; at any rate, if she had not counselled them, she had impelled him to them and had then turned round and refused him the reward for whose sake he had sinned. If he ranked now rather with Fricker than with Mervyn or Constantine Blair, or the men of that sort who had been his colleagues and his equals, the heaviest of the blame rested on Trix. If the meshes of the Fricker net enveloped him more closely day by day, hers was the fault. Countenanced by an element of truth, carried the whole way by resentment, by jealousy, and by the impulse to acquit himself at another's expense, he would have rejoiced to make Trix his scapegoat and to lay on her the burden of his sins. Though she could not bear his punishment, he welcomed her as his partner in misfortune. He longed to see her in her humiliation, and sought a way. When he asked himself what he meant to say to her he could not answer; his impulse was to see her in the dust.