'About your divorce—'
Lady Maud smiled rather contemptuously.
'Is it already in the papers?' she asked, glancing at the one Margaret had brought. 'I only heard of it myself an hour ago!'
'Then it's really true! There's a horrid article about it—'
Margaret was evidently much more disturbed than her friend, who sat down in a careless attitude and smiled at her.
'It had to come some day. And besides,' added Lady Maud, 'I don't care!'
'There's something about me too,' answered Margaret, 'and I cannot help caring.'
'About you?'
'Me and Mr. Van Torp—the article is written by some one who hates him—that's clear!—and you know I don't like him; but that's no reason why I should be dragged in.'
She was rather incoherent, and Lady Maud took the paper from her hand quietly, and found the article at once. It was as 'horrid' as the Primadonna said it was. No names were given in full, but there could not be the slightest mistake about the persons referred to, who were all clearly labelled by bits of characteristic description. It was all in the ponderously airy form of one of those more or less true stories of which some modern weeklies seem to have an inexhaustible supply, but it was a particularly vicious specimen of its class so far as Mr. Van Torp was concerned. His life was torn up by the roots and mercilessly pulled to pieces, and he was shown to the public as a Leicester Square Lovelace or a Bowery Don Juan. His baleful career was traced from his supposed affair with Mrs. Isidore Bamberger and her divorce to the scene at Margaret's hotel in New York, and from that to the occasion of his being caught with Lady Maud in Hare Court by a justly angry husband; and there was, moreover, a pretty plain allusion to little Ida Moon.