DIVORCE-COURT proceedings can be confidently abandoned to the admirable frankness of the Sabbath press. The “Strong romance” had produced some excitement in cultured circles, and provided the Saltire moralists with a fable that promised to serve for many generations. Seeing that there had been no defence, and that the case had progressed with unsensational speed, it had failed to become notorious in any popular sense. Fashion had not flattered it, nor had it been wildly paragraphed in the evening papers. There had been no thrashing out of delicate details, so that the “mess” was not highly savored enough to please the public palate.
Honest gold had gilded the tongues of unprejudiced and veracious witnesses. Truth, hired for the occasion, had blown her brazen trumpet in the court, a fine fan-fan in praise of justice. Maltravers’ guineas had instilled wondrous intelligence into sundry rustic noddles. Ophelia, a matrimonial martyr, had been crowned with the crown of virgin liberty.
One night in early spring you might have seen a white-faced man writing at a table in the third-floor room of a Bloomsbury lodging-house. A cheap brass lamp shed an unpleasant savor from beneath its yellow paper shade. The table-cloth, a dingy red, was smutched with ink-stains and the dyes of many dinners. Faded chromographs covered the walls. The carpet was threadbare, the chintz curtains dirty. A few live coals still smoked in the unpolished grate.
Midnight was at hand; a church clock in the neighborhood had chimed the quarter. The footfalls in the street grew few and infrequent. London, vast, palpitating giant, had turned from toil to brief, healthless sleep. Her myriad fires burned dim under the stars. Her great heart slackened from the moil of greed and care.
The man before the lamp labored and bent his brows. Papers and a few books were squandered on the table, while under the lamp stood a bowl of golden primroses, children of joy, fair stars of the dawning year. The man’s pen scratched feverishly over the paper. Often he would pause, stare at the lamp, glance at the golden flowers, and smile. His eyes were lustreless and heavy, his face thin. From time to time he would take up a written page, stare at the scrawled and erasured sheet, smite out a word with a stroke of the pen, sigh, and toss the page aside with a twinge of despair.
As the clock chimed midnight the door opened, and a girl in a red gown came in from the dark landing. Her hair, noosed with a strand of blue, poured over her white ears and about her shapely throat. There were shadows under her eyes; she looked thinner and more ethereal than of yore; the June freshness upon her face had fade............