But frail, sensitive,
tender-hearted, little Sally Bishop was not of that blood, that
breeding was not in her bone. She took the threads, coloured them
one and all with that deceptive dye of the imagination, and wove a
romance out of the materials of a stern reality.
To every intent, to every purpose in her mind, she was a married woman.
The constant use of his name in the hotels where they stayed abroad
had fostered the delusion in her mind. That, in reality, she was still
Sally Bishop was a fact, obvious enough, patent enough, and one which
she was not so foolish as to try and force herself to forget; but
she was Sally Bishop only in name. So, in contrary comparison, other
women were wives only in name, yet had no husbands.
The true, logical state of the case never made its appeal to her.
She was too much of a romantic, living, as many women do, in a
cloudland of hallucination, until a lightning circumstance tears its
rent in the vaporous fabric and experience thunders in their ears.
Had she consented to the reasoning that she had but left the plying
of one trade in exchange for another; had she admitted the fact that
she had but abandoned one master for the service of another, there
would have been every chance that, if the end should come, she would
be able to take up the threads where they had broken off and wring
profit from the ultimate position.
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