The Argosy — page 195: what you’re looking at

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

180 Court Netherleigh. received kindly, or treated warmly. No, she had given too serious offence for that. Her mother did not spare her in the matter of reproach ; her father was calmly bitter; Grace was cold. Lady Sarah Hope ran away to the country to avoid her, taking her sister Frances and Alice Dalrymple; and Lady Sarah did not scruple to let it be known at her father’s why she had gone. Lord and Lady Acorn might have their personal failings, the one be too lavish of money, the other of temper, but they had at least brought up their daughters to be good and honourable women, in- stilling into them upright principles ; and the blow was a sharp one. They deemed it right and just not to spare her who had inflicted it in wanton wilfulness—and they let her pain come home to her. It all told upon Adela. The world turned upon her a cold shoulder. Rumours of the separation between Mr. and Lady Adela Grubb soon grew into certainty ; and the world wanted to know the cause of it. For, after all, the true and immediate cause, that terrible crime she had allowed herself to commit, never transpired. ‘The very few individuals cog- nisant of it buried the secret within their own bosoms for her good name’s sake. No clue transpiring as to this, people fell back upon the other and only cause known, more or less, to them—her long- maintained cavalier treatment of her husband. Mr. Grubb must have come to his senses at last, reasoned society, and sent her home to her mother. And society considered that he had done righteously. So the world, taking up other people’s business according to custom, turned its back upon her. Which was, to say the least of it, incon- sistent. For now, had the Lady Adela been suspected of any grave social crime ; one, let us say, involving fears of having to appear before the Judge of the Court of Probate, society would have shaken hands with her as usual, so long as public proceedings remained in abeyance : what everybody might privately see or suspect, goes for nothing. ‘This other offence was lighter, it did not involve those fatal extremes ; this was more as though she were being punished as a naughty child; consequently the world thought fit to let its opinion be known, and to deal out a meed of censure on its own immaculate score. But it told, I say, on Lady Adela. ‘Told cruelly. Cast off by her husband for good and aye; tacitly reproached daily and hourly by her parents ; rejected by her sisters, as though she might tarnish them if brought into too close contact ; and looked askance at by society ; Lady Adela drank the cup of repentance to the dregs. If she could but undo her work !—if that one fatal morning, when she found the cheque-book lying on the floor.of her husband’s dress- ing-room, had never been numbered in the calendar of the past! She was for ever wishing this fruitless wish. She was for ever wishing that her treatment of her husband had been different in the time before that one temptation set in, Gomicbooks (E(0)