Chapter 16

The vicinity of the young man he certainly relished, educated, distingué , and impulsive into the bargain, far and away the pick of the bunch, though you wouldn’t think he had it in him⁠ ⁠… yet you would. Besides he said the picture was handsome which, say what you like, it was, though at the moment she was distinctly stouter. And why not? An awful lot of makebelieve went on about that sort of thing involving a lifelong slur with the usual splash page of letterpress about the same old matrimonial tangle alleging misconduct with professional golfer or the newest stage favourite instead of being honest and aboveboard about the whole business. How they were fated to meet and an attachment sprang up between the two so that their names were coupled in the public eye was told in court with letters containing the habitual mushy and compromising expressions, leaving no loophole, to show that they openly cohabited two or three times a week at some wellknown seaside hotel and relations, when the thing ran its normal course, became in due course intimate. Then the decree nisi and the King’s Proctor to show cause why and, he failing to quash it, nisi was made absolute. But as for that, the two misdemeanants, wrapped up as they largely were in one another, could safely afford to ignore it as they very largely did till the matter was put in the hands of a solicitor, who filed a petition for the