A Social Meteor — page 194: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

184 A SOCIAL METEOR, haughtily, and swept from the room with the air of an injured queen. But once in her own chamber, her proud head drooped, and finding herself alone, she sank cow- ering upon the floor, moaning: “Oh, how can I give it allup? Icannot, I cannot; it would kill me.” Then she looked helplessly at her little white hands, with their delicate pink nails. “What’s to become of me? What can I do? Can I endure to have the people who consider it an honor to entertain me now, turn up their noses at me? Or, worse still, can I stand being boxed up in a little bit of a place, with perhaps one slip- shod maid-of-all-work, and with a man whom I loathe, fora companion? No, a thousand times no.”’ She arose and walked slowly through the length and breadth of her apartments; then she went softly down stairs, and passed through the | superb parlors and drawing-rooms, looking at and touching everything in a reverent, halfun- conscious way, with a mournful smile on her lips. What pride she had taken in her enter- tainments; in knowing that her reputation as a hostess had traveled far and wide; that people Eomicbooks (E(o)