Red Pottage by Mary Cholmondeley, Fiction, Classics, Literary

"I will break it off," says Hugh Scarlett to himself. "Thank Heaven, not a soul has ever guessed it."

He thinks of the day he first met her, when he looked upon her as merely a pretty woman. He recalls their other days together, and the gradual building up between them of a fairy palace. He added a stone here, she a stone there -- until suddenly it became a prison. Had he been tempter, or tempted? He cannot say. He wants only to be out of it. His infatuation has run its course. His judgment has been whirled -- he tells himself it had been whirled, but had it really only been tweaked? -- from its center. It performed its giddy orbit, and now the check-string has brought it back to the point from whence it had set out -- namely, that she is merely a pretty woman.

Yet nothing in life is simple. Lord Newhaven suspects -- or more than suspects: for he introduces the modern equivalent of the duel! And Hugh has had a vision of hope for the future, in a sympathetic soul -- in the eyes of Rachel West.

Novelist Mary Cholmondeley (1859-1925) was author of such satiric novels of middle-class life as Moth and Rust and Diana Tempest.