"If she's not careful," Will said to me one day, "she'll cook her own goose as well as Spenworth's."
I had to ask him to express his fears in simpler language.
"There is such a person as a King's Proctor," he said, "though they don't seem aware of it. If she plays the fool with Laughton, the decree won't be made absolute; and she and Spenworth will be tied to each other for the rest of their lives. That would hardly suit their book."
Do you ever feel that you have strayed into a new world? The fact of divorce... And then this light-hearted pairing off: Spenworth with some woman who had been setting her cap at him for years, Kathleen with the love of her youth. They had lost all reverence for marriage, the family; it was a game, a dance—like that figure in the lancers, where you offer your right hand first and then your left... I made Will explain the whole position to me again and again until I had it quite clear in my mind. The King's Proctor, as he described him—rather naughtily—, was "a licensed spoil-sport", who intervened in cases where the divorce was being arranged by collusion or where both parties had sinned.
"The office seems a sinecure," I commented.
Those two thousand petitions... They stick in my throat.
"As a rule people don't take risks," Will explained. "And it's not often to the advantage of an outsider to come in and upset the apple-cart. You or the guv'nor or I," he said, "could do a lot of mischief, if we liked; but we're interested parties, and it wouldn't look well."
I confess that I did not share his tenderness towards what is nothing but a life of premeditated sin... Yes, I know it's legal, but Parliament can make a thing legal without making it right. The whole subject, however, was very distasteful, and I did not pursue it. That night I let fall a hint to Arthur, but he was not disposed to take any action.
"She's a bigger fool than I took her for," was all he would say. "She's endangering her own future and Spenworth's and playing into our hands if we chose to take advantage of our opportunity."
Whether Arthur spoke to her or not, I cannot say; but I know that she received a very frank warning from her own solicitors. Spenworth, too, did us the honour to write and say: "For heaven's sake keep that—" I forget the actual phrasing—"keep that man away from Katie, or he'll do us in." Spenworth was always noted for his elegance of diction... If a pawn could speak, I'm sure its feelings would be very much what mine were: pushed hither and thither in a game that I did not begin to understand. I had never asked Captain Laughton to the house; he invited himself, and by the same token I knew that it was no good telling him to stay away. My house was not my own, my soul was not my own. And I had that hopeless sense that, whatever I did, I should be wrong...