Really and truly, the interest that total strangers take in other people's affairs the moment that sinister word "divorce" is pronounced... Within two days the story was on every one's lips: Spenworth was the one topic of conversation, and everything was known. I think it is called a petition for restitution. Alas! for twenty years it would always have been easy to produce evidence of Spenworth's vagaries; now, I gathered, he was to "desert" Kathleen and then refuse to obey some order to come back. I don't profess to understand the subject; it is wholly distasteful to me... "And what then?," I asked. "A decree _nisi_," Will told me. "I gather my next aunt has been chosen already." I will not mention her name. She who marries a man that has been put away... Perhaps I take too lofty a view of human nature, knowing my brother-in-law as I do; but, until he _actually_ marries her, I shall continue to look for a sign of grace. "And now perhaps Cheniston is going to have an heir after all," said Will. I confess that I was thinking not at all of Cheniston at this season, though a second marriage may revolutionize everything. The shame of seeing my husband's elder brother, the head of an historic family, in the Divorce Court... And already thinking of another union with goodness knows who; and, once he begins, there is no reason why he should ever stop. I am told that there are more than two thousand cases waiting to be tried. The war! I always felt that you could not have an upheaval on that scale without paying for it afterwards. There are moments when I feel glad that my dear father did not live to see this _bouleversement_... Mere beasts of the field... "I cannot discuss this," I told Will. My husband had heard the story too and was so much shocked that I dared not allude to it. We could _do_ nothing... I _did_ make one effort. I tried to persuade my brother to reason with her. The opinion of an outsider--and Brackenbury has the reputation, not perhaps very well-founded, if you consider his own life, of being a man of the world... He would only say that, though "dear old Spenworth" was "no end of a good fellow", he was also "no end of a bad husband" and that, if Kathleen had had sense or spirit, she'd have divorced him a dozen years ago. Then, against my own inclinations, I went to see Kathleen and literally begged her to reconsider her decision before it was too late. One might as profitably have spoken to the dead... She was not antagonistic in any way. Indeed, our meeting would have been profoundly interesting, if it had not been so painful. She was still in love with Spenworth. Men like that, dissolute and unfaithful, seem to have an animal magnetism which holds certain women in complete subjection. Kathleen was _miserable_ at the thought of parting from her scamp of a husband. "I couldn't do it if I didn't love him," she cried.