Produced by David Widger
By Winston Churchill
Honora did not go back to Quicksands. Neither, in this modern chronicle,shall we.
The sphere we have left, which we know is sordid, sometimes shines in theretrospect. And there came a time, after the excitement of furnishing thenew house was over, when our heroine, as it were, swung for a time inspace: not for a very long time; that month, perhaps, between autumn andwinter.
We need not be worried about her, though we may pause for a moment or twoto sympathize with her in her loneliness—or rather in the moods itproduced. She even felt, in those days, slightly akin to the Lady of theVictoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enoughoccasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with anexpression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes fourtimes a day.
Sympathy! We have seen Honora surrounded by friends—what has become ofthem? Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of themost desirable houses in New York. What more could be wished for? To jumpat conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a heroine with anIdeal. She had these things, and—strange as it may seem—suffered.
Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especiallybeautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it wasnot taste. Honora sat in it and wondered: wondered, as she looked backover the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal,whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn. The farthershe travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land ofunrealities. The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and whichshe had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not havebeen greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a scene ina theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them. They did not belongto her, nor she to them.
Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified inlooking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own:and children's children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carvedstone mantel. The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats mightappropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Wouldnot the warriors and the wits, the patient ladies of high degree and ofmany children, and even the 'precieuses ridicules' themselves, turn overin their graves if they could so much as imagine the contents of thesingle street in modern New York where Honora lived?
One morning, as she sat in that room, possessed by these whimsical thoughpainful fancies, she picked up a newspaper and glanced through it,absently, until her eye fell by chance upon a name on the editorial page.Something like an electric shock ran through her, and the letters of thename seemed to quiver and become red. Slowly they spelled—Peter Erwin.
"The argument of Mr. Peter Erwin, of St. Louis, before the Supreme Courtof the United States in the now celebrated Snowden case is universallyacknowledged by lawyers to have been masterly, and reminiscent of thegreat names of the profession in the past. Mr. Erwin is not dramatic. Heappears to carry all before him by the sheer force of intellect, and by akind of Lincolnian ability to expose a fallacy: He is still a young man,self-made, and studied law under Judge Brice of St. Louis, once Presidentof the National Bar