Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/83

 If they failed to secure rooms and could not communicate with us in time. . . If for any reason we did not meet at the rendez-vous. . . I can assure you that I gave myself a headache, just thinking of one possible disaster after another. It would not have passed unnoticed; we had received ample evidence of that. Most dreadful misconstructions would be placed on their conduct—and on mine. The King’s Proctor—really, the name is so absurd; one makes a mental picture of some strange court functionary taken straight from the pages of that delightful Lewis Carroll book—I became haunted by visions of the King’s Proctor intervening to stay the divorce proceedings. And then, as Will said so lucidly, Spenworth and Kathleen would be tied to each other for the rest of their lives; gone would be her St. Martin’s summer of romance, gone would be—no, romance is always to me a singularly beautiful word; I decline to associate it with what my boy calls Spenworth’s latest shuffle of the matrimonial pack. The worst thing of all was that we should be held responsible.

“I wonder what Spenworth would do if the positions were reversed,” said Will. “If the guv’nor were elder brother and wanted an heir, if he had the chance of stopping it and keeping