Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/70

 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. ..

I did make one effort. I tried to persuade my brother to reason with her. The opinion of an outsider—and Brackenbury has the reputation, not perhaps very well-founded, if you consider his own life, of being a man of the world. . . He would only say that, though “dear old Spenworth” was “no end of a good fellow”, he was also “no end of a bad husband” and that, if Kathleen had had sense or spirit, she’d have divorced him a dozen years ago. Then, against my own inclinations, I went to see Kathleen and literally begged her to reconsider her decision before it was too