But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife, Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a visiting friend.
Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.
She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a great instinct for organisation and business enterprise—just what was needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos. She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked him for.
An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense, homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form can never attain.
There was a local busybody of a minister, and it was he who first intimated to the then Mrs. Spalton that her dear and intimate friend, was betraying her....
There followed the usual spying and publicity ... Mrs. Spalton won her divorce....
But this was after several years. Long before the divorce was granted John and Dorothy were aware of a tangible fruit of their love.... I had often wondered why the Master so ardently, so often, wrote eloquently in defense of the superior qualities of illegitimate children....
Dorothy bore their child ... a girl ... and went away to teach in a smart school somewhere in the East, under an assumed name....
Now, after many years, Spalton and she married.