She wrote imploring him to set her free. It was rooted in her, the fear that he would compel her to come back, that he had the power to make her. She wanted (he seemed to see it) to feel safe from him forever. Leonard had promised to marry her if she were free. She intimated that Leonard was everything that was generous and honorable. She wanted (she who had abused him so for having married her), she wanted to marry Mercier, to have a hold on him and be safe. Marriage was her idea of safety now. She went on to say that if he would consent to divorce her, it would be made easy for him, she would not defend the suit. That meant--he puzzled it out--that meant that it would lie between the two of them. Nobody else would be dragged into it. Winny's name would not by any possibility be dragged in. Violet would have no use for Winny, since she was not going to defend the suit. She might--at the worst--have to appear as witness, if the evidence of Violet's letters (her own admission) was not sufficient. It looked as if it would be simple enough. Why should he not release her? He had no business not to give her the chance to marry Mercier, to regulate the relation, if that was what she wanted. It was his own chance, too, his one chance. He would be a fool not to take it. And as it came over him in its fullness, all that it meant and would yet mean, Ranny felt his heart thumping and bounding, dangerously, in its weakened state. On a Wednesday evening in November, he presented himself once more at the Regent Street Polytechnic and at the door of an office where, on Wednesday evenings, an experienced legal adviser held himself in readiness to give advice, that legal adviser who had been the jest of his adolescence, whose services he had not conceived it possible that he should require. He had a curiously uplifting sense of the gravity and impressiveness of the business upon which at last, inconceivably, he came. But this odd elation was controlled and finally overpowered by disgust and shame, as one by one, under the kind but acute examination of the legal man, he brought out for his inspection the atrocious details. And he had to show Violet's letter of September, the document, supremely valuable, supremely infamous, supported by the further communication of November. The keen man asked him, as his uncle and his father-in-law had asked, if he had given any provocation, any cause for jealousy, misunderstanding, or the like? Had his own conduct been irreproachable? When all this part of it was over, settled to the keen man's satisfaction, Ranny was told that there was little doubt that he could get his divorce if--that was the question--he could afford to pay. Divorce was, yes, it was a costly matter, almost, you might say, the luxury of the rich. A matter, for him, probably of forty or fifty pounds--well, say, thirty, when you'd cut expenses down to the very lowest limit. Could he, the keen but kindly man inquired, afford thirty?