Diana Tempest, Volume II

"The fact is, I have never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know."-George Eliot. IT was the middle of July. The season had reached the climax which precedes a collapse. The heat was intense. The pace had been too great to last. The rich sane were already on their way to Scotch moor or Norwegian river; the rich insane and the poor remained, and people with daughters-assiduously entertaining the dwindling numbers of the "uncertain, coy, and hard to please" jeunesse dorée of the present day. There were some great weddings fixed for the end of July, proving that marriage was not extinct, -prospective weddings which, like iron rivets, held the crumbling fabric of the season together.