Family Pride; Or, Purified by SufferingHolmes, Mary Jane
General
Family Pride; Or, Purified by Suffering
Holmes, Mary Jane
American fiction; Dime novels
As it had been at Saratoga, so it was at Newport. Urged on by Mrs.
Cameron and Bell, who greatly enjoyed her notoriety, Katy plunged into
the mad excitement of dancing and driving and coquetting, until Wilford
himself became uneasy, locking her once in her room, where she was
sleeping after dinner, and conveniently forgetting to release her until
after the departure at evening of some young men from Cambridge, whose
attentions to the Ocean House belle had been more strongly marked than
was altogether agreeable to him. Of course it was a mistake--the locking
of the door--and a great oversight in him not to have remembered it
sooner, he said to Katy, by way of apology; and Katy, with no suspicion
of the truth, laughed merrily at the joke, repeating it downstairs to
the old dowagers, who shrugged their shoulders meaningly and whispered
to each other that it might be well if more young, handsome wives were
locked into their rooms and thus kept out of mischief.
Though flattered, caressed and admired, Katy was not doing herself much
credit at Newport, but after Wilford there was no one to raise a warning
voice, until Mark Ray came down for a few days' respite from the heated
city, where he spent the entire summer, taking charge of the business
which belonged as much to Wilford as to himself. But Wilford had a wife;
it was more necessary that he should leave, Mark had argued; his time
would come by and by. And so he had remained at home until the last of
August, when he appeared suddenly at the Ocean House one night when
Katy, in her airy robes and childlike simplicity, was breaking hearts by
the score. Like others, Mark was charmed, and not a little proud, for
Katy's sake, to see her thus appreciated; but when one day's experience
had shown him more and given him a look behind the scenes, he trembled
for her, knowing how hard it would be for her to come out of that sea of
dissipation as pure and spotless as she went in.
"If I were her brother I would warn her that her present career, though
very delightful now, is not one upon which she will look back with
pleasure when the excitement is over," he said to himself; "but if
Wilford is satisfied it is not for me to interfere. It is surely nothing
to me what Katy Cameron does," he kept repeating to himself; but as
often as he said it there came up before him a pale, anxious face,
shaded with Helen Lennox's bands of hair, and Helen Lennox's voice
whispered to him: "Save Katy, for my sake;" and so next day, when Mark
found himself alone with Katy, while most of the guests were at the
beach, he questioned her of her life at Saratoga and Newport, and
gradually, as he talked, there crept into Katy's heart a suspicion that
he was not altogether pleased with her account, or with what he had seen
of her since his arrival.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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