There are things I can say to you that I would never breathe to a man. I, personally, never make a mystery of my age; you will find it in all the books, every one knows I am six years older than Arthur, four years older than Spenworth--why conceal it? I wished Kathleen could have been equally frank, could have seen herself as I saw her. She is within a few months of thirty-nine, with four strapping girls; one does expect a certain dignity and restraint at that age. I know what you are going to say! We of the older generation _usually_ expect more than we receive. I have learnt that lesson, thank you! Kathleen seemed to fancy that she was back in the period of this boy-and-girl attachment to which I have alluded. She and Captain Laughton were inseparable. He took her to _dances_ ... as if she were eighteen! Indecent, I considered it. And I wondered what her girls thought of their mother,--if they're capable of thinking at all. I don't associate _brains_ with that chocolate-box beauty... Dances, dinners, little expeditions. Every one was beginning to smile... "If she's not careful," Will said to me one day, "she'll cook her own goose as well as Spenworth's." I had to ask him to express his fears in simpler language. "There _is_ such a person as a King's Proctor," he said, "though they don't seem aware of it. If she plays the fool with Laughton, the decree won't be made absolute; and she and Spenworth will be tied to each other for the rest of their lives. That would hardly suit _their_ book." Do you ever feel that you have strayed into a new world? The fact of divorce... And then this light-hearted pairing off: Spenworth with some woman who had been setting her cap at him for years, Kathleen with the love of her youth. They had lost all reverence for marriage, the family; it was a game, a dance--like that figure in the lancers, where you offer your right hand first and then your left... I made Will explain the whole position to me again and again until I had it quite clear in my mind. The King's Proctor, as he described him--rather naughtily--, was "a licensed spoil-sport", who intervened in cases where the divorce was being arranged by collusion or where both parties had sinned. "The office seems a sinecure," I commented. Those two thousand petitions... They stick in my throat. "As a rule people don't take risks," Will explained. "And it's not often to the advantage of an outsider to come in and upset the apple-cart. You or the guv'nor or I," he said, "could do a lot of mischief, if we liked; but we're interested parties, and it wouldn't look well." I confess that I did not share his tenderness towards what is nothing but a life of premeditated sin... Yes, I know it's _legal_, but Parliament can make a thing legal without making it _right_. The whole subject, however, was very distasteful, and I did not pursue it. That night I let fall a hint to Arthur, but he was not disposed to take any action.