Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/75

 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 spoilsport”, 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.”