Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/77

 had that hopeless sense that, whatever I did, I should be wrong. ..

It was a trying season. . . Their behaviour was so extraordinary! I pinched myself and said: “This is the woman who cried to you because she was losing Spenworth, because the light was being taken out of her life. She was sacrificing herself to make Spenworth happy!” I admit that I was taken in. She may have been sincere at the time, but that is only the more discreditable. To cry for Spenworth one day and for her Captain Laughton the next. . . I use the word literally; if a single day passed without her seeing him, she moped—for all the world like a love-sick girl who thinks her sweetheart is tiring of her. And when they met. ..

I have told you that people were beginning to smile, and that should have been humiliating enough to a woman who has achieved at least a dignity of position; one said that there was nothing in it, but that had no effect. Anything connected with divorce seems to breed a morbid curiosity; they were being spied on, whispered about; people who did not wait to consider that Kathleen was nearly forty assumed that she would inevitably marry again and decided no less obstinately that she would marry Laughton. Then the tittle-tattle press laid hold of her. I