Page 656 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

that his apparent affection had been born of sensuality, and
had perished in the fires it had itself kindled. Many women
have, unhappily, made some such discovery as this, but for
most women there is some distracting occupation. Had it
been Sylvia’s fate to live in the midst of fashion and soci-
ety, she would have found relief in the conversation of the
witty, or the homage of the distinguished. Had fortune cast
her lot in a city, Mrs. Frere might have become one of those
charming women who collect around their supper-tables
whatever of male intellect is obtainable, and who find the
husband admirably useful to open his own champagne bot-
tles. The celebrated women who have stepped out of their
domestic circles to enchant or astonish the world, have al-
most invariably been cursed with unhappy homes. But poor
Sylvia was not destined to this fortune. Cast back upon her-
self, she found no surcease of pain in her own imaginings,
and meeting with a man sufficiently her elder to encourage
her to talk, and sufficiently clever to induce her to seek his
society and his advice, she learnt, for the first time, to for-
get her own griefs; for the first time she suffered her nature
to expand under the sun of a congenial influence. This sun,
suddenly withdrawn, her soul, grown accustomed to the
warmth and light, shivered at the gloom, and she looked
about her in dismay at the dull and barren prospect of life
which lay before her. In a word, she found that the society
of North had become so far necessary to her that to be de-
prived of it was a grief—notwithstanding that her husband
remained to console her.
After a week of such reflections, the barrenness of life