“I'm confoundedly sorry if it's so,” Mr. Shorter continued, with sincerity. “She has a brilliant future ahead of her. She's got good blood in her, she's stunning to look at, and she's made her own way in spite of that Billycock of a husband who talks like the original Rothschild. By the bye, Wing is using him for a good thing. He's sent him out West to pull that street railway chestnut out of the fire. I'm not particularly squeamish, Reggie, though I try to play the game straight myself—the way my father played it. But by the lord Harry, I can't see the difference between Dick Turpin and Wing and Trixy Brent. It's hold and deliver with those fellows. But if the police get anybody, their get Spence.”
“The police never get anybody,” said Farwell, pessimistically; for the change of topic bored him.
“No, I suppose they don't,” answered Mr. Shorter, cheerfully finishing his chartreuse, and fixing his eye on one of the coloured lithographs of lean horses on Cecil Grainger's wall. “I'd talk to Hugh, if I wasn't as much afraid of him as of Jim Jeffries. I don't want to see him ruin her career.”
“Why should an affair with him ruin it?” asked Farwell, unexpectedly. “There was Constance Witherspoon. I understand that went pretty far.”
“My dear boy,” said Mr. Shorter, “it's the women. Bessie Grainger here, for instance—she'd go right up in the air. And the women had—well, a childhood-interest in Constance. Self-preservation is the first law—of women.”
“They say Hugh has changed—that he wants to settle down,” said Farwell.
“If you'd ever gone to church, Reggie,” said Mr. Shorter, “you'd know something about the limitations of the leopard.”
CHAPTER VII. “LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS”
That night was Honora's soul played upon by the unknown musician of the sleepless hours. Now a mad, ecstatic chorus dinned in her ears and set her blood coursing; and again despair seized her with a dirge. Periods of semiconsciousness only came to her, and from one of these she was suddenly startled into wakefulness by her own words. “I have the right to make of my life what I can.” But when she beheld the road of terrors that stretched between her and the shining places, it seemed as though she would never have the courage to fare forth along its way. To look back was to survey a prospect even more dreadful.