"She's a bigger fool than I took her for," was all he would say. "She's endangering her own future and Spenworth's and playing into our hands if we chose to take advantage of our opportunity." Whether Arthur spoke to her or not, I cannot say; but I know that she received a very frank warning from her own solicitors. Spenworth, too, did us the honour to write and say: "_For heaven's sake keep that_--" I forget the actual phrasing--"_keep that man away from Katie, or he'll do us in_." Spenworth was always noted for his elegance of diction... If a pawn could speak, I'm sure its feelings would be very much what mine were: pushed hither and thither in a game that I did not begin to understand. _I_ had never asked Captain Laughton to the house; he invited himself, and by the same token I knew that it was no good telling him to stay away. My house was not my own, my soul was not my own. And I had that hopeless sense that, whatever I did, I should be wrong... It was a trying season... Their behaviour was so extraordinary! I pinched myself and said: "_This_ is the woman who cried to you because she was losing Spenworth, because the light was being taken out of her life. She was sacrificing herself to make Spenworth happy!" I admit that I was taken in. She may have been sincere at the time, but that is only the more discreditable. To cry for Spenworth one day and for her Captain Laughton the next... I use the word literally; if a single day passed without her seeing him, she moped--for all the world like a love-sick girl who thinks her sweetheart is tiring of her. And when they met... I have told you that people were beginning to smile, and that should have been humiliating enough to a woman who has achieved at least a dignity of _position_; one said that there was nothing in it, but that had no effect. Anything connected with divorce seems to breed a morbid curiosity; they were being spied on, whispered about; people who did not wait to consider that Kathleen was nearly forty assumed that she would inevitably marry again and decided no less obstinately that she would marry Laughton. Then the tittle-tattle press laid hold of her. I am told that certain women, probably known to both of us, earn a _livelihood_ by collecting gossip at one's dinner-table and selling it at so much a scandal to these wretched papers. One is quite defenceless... I noticed for myself--and others were indefatigable in shewing me--little snippets saying that Lady Spenworth and Captain Laughton had been seen at this or that garish new restaurant. I believe that Kathleen's solicitors wrote to her a second time...