Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman
was one of the greatest heiresses in Peru—or it may have been Argentina. This Sawyer was a ne’er-do-well Irishman who had been sent to South America . . . as one does have to send these people sometimes; he fascinated her, married her, beat her (I should think) and drank himself to death, leaving her utterly broken-hearted and disillusionized—not with him alone, but with the world. . . She had come to Europe to find a new life. Such was the story that Connie Maitland shouted at one; and, if poor Mrs. Sawyer overheard it, so much the worse for her. . .
A romantic setting, do you not agree? If you had seen her come into a room with those great, tragic eyes sweeping face after face as though she were looking for the one man who would gather up the fragments of her broken youth. . . If I had been a man. . . Superb diamonds, I need hardly say; and almost an arrogance of mourning, as though she would not be comforted. . . All the young men followed her with their eyes—spell-bound. And some men no longer young. . .
Do you see much of that pathetic class of over-ripe bachelor which my boy rather naughtily calls the “Have-Beens”? They are common, I suppose, to every age and country, but England seems to contain more than her fair
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