The Cameron pride; or, purified by suffering : $b A novelHolmes, Mary Jane
General
The Cameron pride; or, purified by suffering : $b A novel
Holmes, Mary Jane
American fiction -- 19th century
As it had been at Saratoga, so it was at Newport. Urged on by Mrs.
Cameron and Bell, who enjoyed her notoriety, Katy plunged into the mad
excitement of dancing and driving and coqueting, 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 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 save 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 had 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 child-like 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 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 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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