Mr. Chamberlin, who has nothing whatever to do with this chronicle except to have been the indirect means of Honora’s installation, used to come through the wall once a week or so to sit for half an hour on her porch as long as he ever sat anywhere.  He had reddish side-whiskers, and he reminded her of a buzzing toy locomotive wound up tight and suddenly taken from the floor.  She caught glimpses of him sometimes in the mornings buzzing around his gardeners, his painters, his carpenters, and his grooms.  He would buzz the rest of his life, but nothing short of a revolution could take his possessions away.

The Graingers and the Grenfells and the Stranges might move mountains, but not Mr. Chamberlin’s house.  Whatever heart-burnings he may have had because certain people refused to come to his balls, he was in Newport to remain.  He would sit under the battlements until the crack of doom; or rather—­and more appropriate in Mr. Chamberlin’s case—­walk around them and around, blowing trumpets until they capitulated.

Honora magically found herself within them, and without a siege.  Behold her at last in the setting for which we always felt she was destined.  Why is it, in this world, that realization is so difficult a thing?  Now that she is there, how shall we proceed to give the joys of her Elysium their full value?  Not, certainly, by repeating the word pleasure over and over again:  not by describing the palaces at which she lunched and danced and dined, or the bright waters in which she bathed, or the yachts in which she sailed.  During the week, indeed, she moved untrammelled in a world with which she found herself in perfect harmony:  it was new, it was dazzling, it was unexplored.  During the week it possessed still another and more valuable attribute—­it was real.  And she, Honora Leffingwell Spence, was part and parcel of its permanence.  The life relationships of the people by whom she was surrounded became her own.  She had little time for thought—­during the week.

We are dealing, now, in emotions as delicate as cloud shadows, and these drew on as Saturday approached.  On Saturdays and Sundays the quality and texture of life seemed to undergo a change.  Who does not recall the Monday mornings of the school days of youth, and the indefinite feeling betwixt sleep and waking that to-day would not be as yesterday or the day before?  On Saturday mornings, when she went downstairs, she was wont to find the porch littered with newspapers and her husband lounging in a wicker chair behind the disapproving lilacs.  Although they had long ceased to bloom, their colour was purple—­his was pink.

Honora did not at first analyze or define these emotions, and was conscious only of a stirring within her, and a change.  Reality became unreality.  The house in which she lived, and for which she felt a passion of ownership, was for two days a rented house.  Other women in Newport had week-end guests in the guise of husbands, and some of them went so far as to bewail the fact.  Some had got rid of them.  Honora kissed hers dutifully, and picked up the newspapers, drove him to the beach, and took him out to dinner, where he talked oracularly of finance.  On Sunday night he departed, without visible regrets, for New York.