to prepare.  There was only his bare word, only his flat denial—­denial flat, unprofitable, and totally unsupported.  The only person who could support it was the girl, and she was dead:  she was much worse than dead:  she had died in atrocious circumstances, his part in which had earned him the severe censure of the coroner’s jury.  His defence couldn’t have been worse.  He’d tied himself in damning knots ever since he’d first set eyes on the girl, and all he could bring to untie them was simply to say, ‘It wasn’t so.’  His defence was as bad as if he were to stand up before the Divorce Court and say, ’Before she died the girl wrote and signed a statement exonerating me and fixing the paternity on so-and-so.  He’s dead, too, that so-and-so, and as for her signed statement, I’m sorry to say I destroyed it, forgetting I should need it in this suit.  I was worried about something else at the time, and I quite forgot this and I destroyed it.’

“I don’t say his defence would be quite so crudely insulting to the intelligence of the court as that; but I say the whole unsupported twisting and turning and writhing and wriggling of it was not far short of it.

“Well, that was how I figured it out to myself in those days, as the case came along for hearing; and I said to myself:  Was I going to put in affidavits for a stay of hearing for the pleasure of seeing him nursed back to life to go through that agony and ordeal of the inquest again and come out with the same result as if he hadn’t been there at all?  And I decided—­no; no, thanks; not me.  It was too much like patching up a dying man in a civilised country for the pleasure of hanging him, or like fatting up a starving man in a cannibal country for the satisfaction of eating him.

“And I had this.  In further support of my position I had this.  My friend, the Divorce Court is a cynical institution.  If a respondent and a corespondent have been in places and in circumstances where they might have incriminated themselves, the Divorce Court cynically assumes that, being human, they would have incriminated themselves.  ‘But,’ it says to the petitioner, ’I want proof, definite and satisfactory proof of those places and of those circumstances.  That’s what I want.  That’s what you’ve got to give me.’

“Very well.  Listen to me attentively.  Lend me your ears.  The onus of that proof rests on the petitioner.  Because a case is undefended, it doesn’t for one single shadow of a chance follow that the petitioner’s plea is therefore going to be granted.  No.  The Divorce Court may be cynical, but it’s a stickler for proof.  The Divorce Court says to the petitioner, ’It’s up to you.  Prove it.  Never mind what the other side isn’t here to deny.  What you’ve got to do is to satisfy me, to prove to me that these places and these circumstances were so.  Go ahead.  Satisfy me if you can.’