Interested, Ronnie read on. Outside, rain fell and fell. Within was no sound save the rustle of turned paper. The first chapter of "Man's Law"--the second--the third raced through his brain, enthralling him, holding him spellbound. The words became symbols of speech--speech itself. It seemed to him as though Julia Cavendish were actually in the room, as though actually he heard her voice. And the voice told him a story similar to his own. The story of a Ronald Cavendish and an Aliette Brunton!
But so grandly did the story draw him on, that only gradually--gradually as a man sees dawn dissolving night---did Ronnie realize the personal application of it; realize that here, in words of sheer genius, an advocate not tonguetied--where he himself would always have been tonguetied, in Aliette's defense--pleaded not so much the cause of all the Aliettes in the world as, in sentences now so reasoned that they convinced the very intellect, now so passionate that they wrung the very heart, the cause of his own individual Aliette, the cause of Hector Brunton's wife against her legal owner.
And at that, a little, the lawyer in Ronnie's mind ousted, the lover.
Half-way through the book, he put it down for a moment. Sentences--certain sentences so venomous that he marveled his mother could have written them--comments, certain comments all leveled against one particular character, stuck like needles in his legal mind. His legal mind said to him: "Slander. Those sentences, those comments, are actionable."
Then he picked up the manuscript again, and read on--on and on,--unconscious of the clock-tick from the mantelpiece, of the rain ceasing without, of the day dawning wan across the Sussex Downs.
Till violently, with the ending of the tale, remembering his mother's letter, he saw her purpose plain.
"Man's Law" represented Julia's "flaunting policy" carried to its uttermost extreme! It wasn't fiction at all--it was his own story--his story, and Aliette's and Hector's--scarcely disguised! He recollected her interest in the Carrington case--recollected telling her how Belfield had broken Carrington, at long last, by the aid of the press.
Julia, obviously, had planned to break Aliette's husband in much the same way. This book once published, Hector Brunton would be compelled (Julia's photographic memory had etched the husband of her tale so accurately that no reader could mistake him for other than the "hanging prosecutor") to bring an action for divorce. Brunton, even as Carrington, could not permit the knowledge that his wife lived openly with another man to become the public property of Julia Cavendish's million readers.