one of the intellectual journals I read that you have gone in for simple life and scientific farming.  A deuced canny move.  And for the love of heaven, old man, keep it up for a while, anyhow.  I know it’s difficult, but keep it up.  I speak as a friend.

“They received your letters all right, announcing your marriage.  You always enjoyed a row—­I wish you could have been on hand to see and hear this one.  It was no place for a man of peace, and I spent two nights at the club.  I’ve never made any secret, you know, of the fact that I think the Pendleton connection hide-bound.  And you understand Bessie—­there’s no good of my explaining her.  You’d have thought divorce a brand-new invention of the devil, instead of a comparatively old institution.  And if you don’t mind my saying so, my boy, you took this fence a bit on the run, the way you do everything.

“The fact is, divorce is going out of fashion.  Maybe it’s because the Pendleton-Grenfell element have always set their patrician faces against it; maybe its been a bit overdone.  Most people who have tried it have discovered that the fire is no better than the frying- pan—­both hot as soon as they warm up.  Of course, old boy, there’s nothing personal in this.  Sit tight, and stick to the simple life—­ that’s your game as I see it.  No news—­I’ve never known things to be so quiet.  Jerry won over two thousand night before last—­he made it no trumps in his own hand four times running.

“Yours,

“Cecil.”

Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he crushed it.  There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act, and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message of good-will.  Whatever its wording, such it was.  A dark red flush had mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.

“Well?” he said.

She was fighting for her presence of mind.  Flashes of his temper she had known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing—­his anger.  Not his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him before her very eyes.  She had been able to cope with the new man, but she felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.

“What do you expect me to say, Hugh?” she faltered, with a queer feeling that she was not addressing him.

“Anything you like,” he replied.

“Defend Cecil.”

“Why should I defend him?” she said dully.

“Because you have no pride.”

A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this insult reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice shrill with anguish.  But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.

“You couldn’t be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d—­d impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront, an implication that our marriage does not exist.”