Should She Have Left Him? — page 66: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

60 SHOULD SHE HAVE LEFT HIM? Tracey affected Mrs. Trevor-Allen and made her the object of his attentive adoration. The young matron accepted these attentions neither as a tribute to her charms nor asa proof of his fascinations, but as a convenience, her husband having passed into that age and condition when he was neither useful nor obstructive. It was to the young matrons that Tracey devoted himself exclu- sively. The marriage ceremony, for him, invested the other sex with additional charms. “Lhe: oid whose presence politeness only prevented him from ignoring, became at once, after leaving the altar where she had been breathing vows of devotion to a husband, an object to him of adoring interest. There was something dashing, reckless, “‘ demn it, don’t you know,” in this pursuit, that suggested pis- tols and fields of honor—the first of which he had never discharged and the other he would not know if he found himself upon it. Yet he lived in daily hopes of a scandalous gossip in which his name would be involved, and an affatre damour witha high-born, youthful matron, which he had never yet achieved, but which was his highest ambition. He had shown more of good taste, and less of good judgment in his selection of Mrs. Trevor-Allen, than usual. For bright and witty, she was gifted with rare powers of penetration which enabled her to read shrewdly the people who came within her ken. Tracey’s siege might have the exciting qualities of the chase, but it was destined to failure. She told him so, on the day in question. ComicboOoks.c© =