Sally Bishop: A Romance

by E. Temple Thurston

"Well—don't," he added.

But even this did not harbour in her mind. She wrote long, impulsive letters to Janet, pouring out a flood of description of all the places which they visited, opening her heart of its perfect happiness.

"You said he was hard once," she wrote from Florence. "You said you knew he was hard. He's never said a hard thing to me the whole time we've been away. He may be hard to other people. I've seen him awfully bitter sometimes, but never to me. We are in love, you see. We shall always be in love. Dear, dear old Janet, I wish you could be with us."

Janet took a deep breath when she had finished the reading of that letter, and when Mrs. Hewson pushed some shrimps on to her plate, she pulled the shells from them with impatient energy.

And so—slowly, even in that month—some little of the change in her character was wrought. Her nature began to set in the mould of luxury in which he placed her. Not for one moment was she spoilt by it; not for one moment made selfish. Whenever he gave her money for a definite object, she still made her purchases as cheaply as possible, still brought what was left over in the flat of an empty palm to him. But the enfranchising influence of those two years of hard work began to lose its effect. She lost independence at every turn and, by the time they returned to London, was beginning to lean on Traill, rely on him, submit subserviently to every wish he uttered.

Such had been her desertion from the cause, a conscript in which, she had so ill-understood. The falling back into luxury, the acceptance of those things which in her tentative, unrevolutionary way she had always imagined to come into her right of possession, had been very easy—very gentle—the drifting of a feather on an idle summer wind. She had let herself be borne on it, using it, not as an advantage, not as a step to lift her to a greater freedom and a wider independence, but as a fit setting, a worthy environment to this love which consumed the whole of her being and rode, the master, with an unslacking rein, over all her actions.

If she had taken the situation as it was, faced the meaning of it with firm lips and a steady eye, there would have been hope—more, there would have been salvation for her. But frail, sensitive, tender-hearted, little Sally Bishop was not of that blood, that breeding was not in her bone. She took the threads, coloured them one and all with that deceptive dye of the imagination, and wove a romance out of the materials of a stern reality.

To every intent, to every purpose in her mind, she was a married woman. The constant use of his name in the hotels where they stayed abroad had fostered the delusion in her mind. That, in reality, she was still Sally Bishop was a fact, obvious enough, patent enough, and one which she was not so foolish as to try and force herself to forget; but she was Sally Bishop only in name. So, in contrary comparison, other women were wives only in name, yet had no husbands.

The true, logical state of the case never made its appeal to her. She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears. Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there would have been every chance that, if the end should come, she would be able to take up the threads where they had broken off and wring profit from the ultimate position. But no such thought entered her mind. Emancipation was no goal for her ambitions. She sought for chains to gyve about her soul and, in her relationship with Traill, she fondly dreamed that she had found them. If the real aspect of the case had forcibly made its way into her consideration, she would never have accepted the situation, never have laid seal to the compact.

All this delirium of reasoning, she showed in the first few moments to Janet when she had returned to London. Down at Kew she spent an evening, delighted, with a justifiable pride, to be seen in one of the dainty frocks that Traill had bought her.