ON BOARD THE 'CAYMAN.'
Goodwood had come and gone, a brief bright season of loss and gain, fine
gowns, flirtation, lobster en mayonaise, champagne, sunshine, dust,
glare, babble of many voices, successes, failures, triumphs,
humiliations. A very pretty picture to contemplate from the outside,
this little world in holiday clothes, framed in greenery! but just on
the Brocken, where the nicest girl among the dancers had the unpleasant
peculiarity of dropping a little red mouse out of her mouth--so too here
under different forms there were red mice dropping about among the
company. Here a hint of coming insolvency; there a whisper of a
threatened divorce suit, staved off for awhile, compromises, family
secrets, little difficulties everywhere; betrothed couples smilingly
accepting congratulations, who should never have been affianced were
truth and honour the rule of life; forsaken wives pretending to think
their husbands models of fidelity; jovial creatures with ruin staring in
their faces; households divided and shamming union; almost everybody
living above his or her means; and the knowledge that nobody is any
better or any happier than his neighbour society's only fountain of
consolation.
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