Yes, the Carrs had all married badly, reflected Mrs.Carr, with the grief of a mother and the pride of a philosopher whose favourite theory has been substantially verified--every one of them, with, of course, the solitary exception of poor Gabriel himself.
Her weekly letters, pious, gossipy, flowing, reached Gabriella regularly every Monday morning, and were read at breakfast while Mr.Fowler studied the financial columns of the newspaper, and his wife opened her invitations in the intervals between pouring out cups of coffee and inquiring solicitously if any one wanted cream and sugar.
"What's the news ?" George would sometimes ask carelessly; and Gabriella would glance down the pages covered with the formless characters of Mrs.
Carr's fine Italian handwriting (the ladylike hand of the 'sixties), and read out carefully selected bits of provincial gossip, to which a cosmopolitan dash was usually contributed by the adventures, matrimonial or merely amorous, of Florrie Caperton.

Hard, dashing, brilliant on the surface at least, a frank hedonist by inclination, if not by philosophy, Florrie had triumphantly smashed her way through the conventions and the traditions of centuries.
"It's really dreadfully sad about Florrie," wrote Mrs.Carr.

"I am so sorry for poor Bessie, who must feel it more than she lets any one see.
While Algernon was alive we always hoped he would keep Florrie straight (you remember how everybody used to talk about her when she was a girl), but now he has been, dead only a year and a half, and she has already married again and gotten a divorce from her second husband.

You know she ran away with a man named Tom Westcott--nobody ever heard of him, but she met him at the White Sulphur Springs, where he had something to do with the horses, I believe--and the marriage turned out very badly, though for my part I don't believe he was the least bit to blame.
Florrie is so reckless that she would make any man unhappy, and two weeks after the wedding she was separated from him and was back here with Bessie, looking as well and pretty as I ever saw her.

You know black was so becoming to her that she didn't take it off even when she eloped, and now after her divorce she always wears it, just as if she were still in mourning for poor Algernon.