“Yes,” he said, “it's looking very nice. You'd like to see this, I expect.”
“Bellew v. Bellew and Pendyce” was written at the top. Mrs. Pendyce stared at those words as though fascinated by their beauty; it was long before she got beyond them. For the first time the full horror of these matters pierced the kindly armour that lies between mortals and what they do not like to think of. Two men and a woman wrangling, fighting, tearing each other before the eyes of all the world. A woman and two men stripped of charity and gentleness, of moderation and sympathy-stripped of all that made life decent and lovable, squabbling like savages before the eyes of all the world. Two men, and one of them her son, and between them a woman whom both of them had loved! “Bellew v. Bellew and Pendyce”! And this would go down to fame in company with the pitiful stories she had read from time to time with a sort of offended interest; in company with “Snooks v. Snooks and Stiles,” “Horaday v. Horaday,” “Bethany v. Bethany and Sweetenham.” In company with all those cases where everybody seemed so dreadful, yet where she had often and often felt so sorry, as if these poor creatures had been fastened in the stocks by some malignant, loutish spirit, for all that would to come and jeer at. And horror filled her heart. It was all so mean, and gross, and common.
The letter contained but a few words from a firm of solicitors confirming an appointment. She looked up at Mr. Paramor. He stopped pencilling on his blotting-paper, and said at once:
“I shall be seeing these people myself tomorrow afternoon. I shall do my best to make them see reason.”
She felt from his eyes that he knew what she was suffering, and was even suffering with her.
“And if—if they won't?”
“Then I shall go on a different tack altogether, and they must look out for themselves.”
Mrs. Pendyce sank back in her chair; she seemed to smell again that smell of leather and disinfectant, and hear a sound of incessant clicking. She felt faint, and to disguise that faintness asked at random, “What does 'without prejudice' in this letter mean?”
Mr. Paramor smiled.
“That's an expression we always use,” he said. “It means that when we give a thing away, we reserve to ourselves the right of taking it back again.”