The Red Mouse: A Mystery Romance

For years—the best years of her life, for that matter, as she often reflected in lonely moments—Miriam Challoner had been trying to prove to her own satisfaction that her husband was no worse than the majority of young men married to rich women, but she could never find the arguments whereby she might arrive at the desired conclusion. It is not to be wondered at, then, that eventually there came a day when the information was brought to her that even in the gay and ultra-fashionable world in which they moved people spoke of him as that mad Challoner, and were saying that he was going a pace that was rapidly carrying him far beyond the horizon of anything like respectability—going to the dogs, in truth, as fast as her money could take him there.
Now Miriam Challoner was not one of those women who deceive themselves, if not their friends, when they say that if ever they hear of their husbands doing such-and-such-a-thing they know perfectly well what they will do. It is true that, like them, she did nothing; nevertheless, she could not be persuaded to discuss with any one the humiliating position in which her husband had placed her.
In a way, this attitude of hers was unfortunate, for it was more or less responsible for the note of melancholy cadence which crept into her mind. And so it was that before very long she was dimly conscious of an emotion quite unlike anything that she had hitherto experienced: all the bitterness in her heart had given way to a sickening sensation that she, as well as as he, had been tried in the matrimonial furnace and found wanting. Somehow, she had fallen grievously in her own estimation!
And society's estimation? Illusions in that direction were hardly possible; there, too, doubtless she would incur the loss of a certain amount of consideration. And even the non-possession of a highly imaginative temperament did not prevent her from fancying the expressive shrugs, and Oh, of course his wife is to blame, which, for the sake of an inference that is obvious, would be voiced by more than one impeccable dame of her acquaintance—as often as not superbly gullible souls, whose eloquence increases in direct proportion to the world's lack of belief in the fidelity of their liege lords.