'Yes. With Jane ... I spoke to him about Jane a few days before it happened. I thought it might be some use. But I think it only made things worse.... I'd rather leave this to you, unless you hate it too much.... Oh, it's all pretty sickening, isn't it? Gideon--_Gideon_ in this sort of mess. Gideon, the best of the lot of us.... You see, even if it's all moonshine about Hobart, as I'm quite prepared to believe it probably is, he's gone and given plausibility to the yarn by falling in love with Hobart's wife. Nothing can get round that. Why couldn't he have chucked it--gone away--anything--when he felt it coming on? A strong, fine, keen person like that, to be bowled over by his sloppy emotions and dragged through the mud, like any beastly sensualist, or like one of my own cheery relations.... I'd rather he'd done Hobart in. There'd have been some sense about that, if he had. After all, it would have been striking a blow against Potterism. Only, if he did do it, it would be more like him to face the music and own to it. What I can't fit into the picture is Gideon sneaking away in the dark, afraid ... Oh well, it's not my business ... Good-night, Katherine. You'll do it at once, won't you? Ring him up to-morrow and get him to dine with you or something. If there's any way of stopping that poisonous woman's tongue, we'll find it.... Meanwhile, I shall tell our parish workers that Leila Yorke's works are obscene, and that they're not to read them to mother's meetings as is their habit.' I sat up till midnight, wondering how on earth I was going to put it to Arthur. 7 I didn't dine with Arthur. I thought it would last too long, and that he might want me to go, and that I should certainly want to go, after I had said what I had to say. So I rang him up at the office and asked if he could lunch. Not at the club; it's too full of people we know, who keep interrupting, and who would be tremendously edified at catching murmurs about libel and murder and Lady Pinkerton being poisoned. So I said the Temple Bar restaurant in Fleet Street, a disagreeable place, but so noisy and crowded that you can say what you like unheard--unheard very often by the person you are addressing, and certainly by every one else. We sat downstairs, at a table at the back, and there I told him, in what hardly needed to be an undertone, of the rumours that were being circulated about him. I felt like a horrid woman in a village who repeats spiteful gossip and says, 'I'm telling you because I think you ought to know what's being said.' As a matter of fact, this was the one and only case I have ever come across in which I have thought the person concerned ought to know what was being said. As a rule, it seems the last thing they ought to know. He listened, staring at the tablecloth and crumbling his bread. 'Thank you,' he said, 'for telling me. As a matter of fact, I knew. Or, anyhow, guessed.... But I'm not sure that anything can be done to stop it.'