I grew solemn and portentous about it. I enlarged on Harrison’s sufferings. I painted a vivid picture of the miseries the woman must needs undergo in the course of a secret love-affair. I called it vulgar. I called it wicked and selfish. I used expressions which I thought had perished from the vocabulary since the ’eighties. And I ended by saying:
“If you do not promise me to do the decent thing, you cannot expect me to stand by you.” Which was mere blackmail.
There must be more of the old inhibitions alive in even the most modern of us than one would readily credit. Lathom was actually abashed by my eloquence. He protested at first; then he grew sulky; finally, he was touched.
“You’re quite right, old man,” he said, “damn it. I’ve been behaving like a cad. I couldn’t make her happy. I ought to go away. I will go away. You’ve been damned decent to me.” He wrung my hand. I clapped him sentimentally on the shoulder. We wallowed in our own high-mindedness. It must have been a touching sight.
The first disagreeable consequence of this foolish interference with the course of events arrived in the shape of a letter from my fiancée. Miss Milsom had felt it her duty to send one of those warnings. I dashed up to Scotland to put matters right. The greatest compliment I can pay to the open mind and generous common sense of Elizabeth is to say plainly that I had no difficulty about doing this. But I was reminded with a slight shock that Victorian quixotry has a way of landing one in complications. However, no harm appeared to be done, and later on I received a letter from Lathom, dated from Paris, in which he informed me that he was playing the game (the words were proof in themselves of the condition to which I must have reduced him), and that, after a highly emotional scene, Mrs. Harrison and he had agreed to part.
I got married soon after that, and forgot all about Lathom and the Harrisons—the more so as Elizabeth did not encourage me to dwell on