"See here, Mr. Rodd," she began, "I have come to talk to you about Jack Lovejoy. Know anything about me?"
"Nothing," he confessed.
"I don't suppose you've ever seen me on the stage, even?"
"Never!"
"So much the better. I didn't want to go to one of these know-everybody-and-everything theatrical lawyers, who call you 'my dear' and promise you the earth. Well, I married a millionaire over in the States, and I fixed things so that he couldn't get rid of me without it costing him something. I've got an income of five thousand pounds a year, Mr. Rodd, and though that ain't the earth, it's useful."
"Naturally," he assented.
"I've done more than I should like to tell you for Jack Lovejoy," she went on. "Of course, we live together, and we're as much married as the law allows. He'd got nothing but what he was earning, and that wasn't much, when I took him up. Now he's got his motor-car and anything he wants. I'm not a changeable woman. I'm older than he is, of course, but I'm barely forty, and all I wanted of Jack was that he should play the game. He's not doing it, Mr. Rodd."
The lawyer shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly. The question of Lovejoy's infidelities appeared to him profoundly uninteresting.
"I'll tell you how I know," she went on. "We had a little trouble a month ago and I've waited for him to come to me for his cheque since, instead of handing it over. He hasn't been and he's had all the money he wanted. He's getting it from somewhere. What I want to know is where?"
Aaron was a little more interested.