It was Will who brought the news that a divorce was pending. One guessed that Spenworth and Kathleen were living apart, but she had let slip so many opportunities... One asked oneself what new provocation could have roused her.
"Oh, it's a put-up job," said Will. "As Aunt Kathleen hasn't produced a son, Spenworth wants to get free of her and marry some one else. A man at the club told me that he was allowing her twenty thousand a year for his liberty."
Really and truly, the interest that total strangers take in other people's affairs the moment that sinister word "divorce" is pronounced... Within two days the story was on every one's lips: Spenworth was the one topic of conversation, and everything was known. I think it is called a petition for restitution. Alas! for twenty years it would always have been easy to produce evidence of Spenworth's vagaries; now, I gathered, he was to "desert" Kathleen and then refuse to obey some order to come back. I don't profess to understand the subject; it is wholly distasteful to me...
"And what then?," I asked.
"A decree nisi," Will told me. "I gather my next aunt has been chosen already."
I will not mention her name. She who marries a man that has been put away... Perhaps I take too lofty a view of human nature, knowing my brother-in-law as I do; but, until he actually marries her, I shall continue to look for a sign of grace.
"And now perhaps Cheniston is going to have an heir after all," said Will.
I confess that I was thinking not at all of Cheniston at this season, though a second marriage may revolutionize everything. The shame of seeing my husband's elder brother, the head of an historic family, in the Divorce Court... And already thinking of another union with goodness knows who; and, once he begins, there is no reason why he should ever stop. I am told that there are more than two thousand cases waiting to be tried. The war! I always felt that you could not have an upheaval on that scale without paying for it afterwards. There are moments when I feel glad that my dear father did not live to see this bouleversement... Mere beasts of the field...
"I cannot discuss this," I told Will.
My husband had heard the story too and was so much shocked that I dared not allude to it. We could do nothing...