Mrs. Asquith found out by degrees that her cousin’s wife had tried to make him out incapable of managing his affairs, and to get him shut up, which was unkind, seeing that he was perfectly content to commit to her hands the management of these affairs, and never grumbled at her absences, or found fault with her proceedings, too happy to be left with Rhoda in the home he loved. Mrs. Prescott-Rotherham, however, had failed in this, and thereupon had organized another plan for freeing herself from circumstances which she would not tolerate. To have great wealth and belong to a new civilization in which there is little bondage of precedent, and not to have whatever you like, whatever you can pay for, is intolerable. It is always intolerable not to be able to do what one pleases, and have what one likes; but these are things which most people have to put up with. Mrs. Prescott-Rotherham did not see why she should put up with anything she disliked so much, and she went off to America to obtain a divorce. If she had told John this, the probabilities were that, unless some sudden gleam of religious objection had crossed the tranquillity of his dulled brain, he would have acquiesced, as he did everything else. But there are limits to the boldness even of a rich Californian, accustomed to see all obstacles disappear before her. And what she did was to persuade her husband that to confine himself entirely to his own rooms would be good for his eyes and for his health, and that until her return it was his policy to lead a secluded life. She pointed out to him the misery of being plagued by visitors, the trouble which even Rhoda’s governess would bring upon him, and that to seclude himself in the east wing while she was absent was the best thing he could do. Poor John did not know till she was gone that he was to be secluded from Rhoda too; but though it was very difficult to manage him when he learned this, yet he was smoothed down and coaxed into patience for the time. Needless to say that of the divorce suit going briskly on on the other side of the Atlantic nobody knew. The citation to John to appear had been conveyed to him in a newspaper, which he had solemnly opened, as was his wont, looked at with his half-blind eyes, and put away with the remark that there was nothing in it. He was indeed more than half blind, and the paper conveyed to him no information at all.