“Your still affectionate wife,
“Winifred Dartie.”

Ugh!  What bitter humbug!  He remembered leaning over Winifred while she copied what he had pencilled, and how she had said, laying down her pen, “Suppose he comes, Soames!” in such a strange tone of voice, as if she did not know her own mind.  “He won’t come,” he had answered, “till he’s spent his money.  That’s why we must act at once.”  Annexed to the copy of that letter was the original of Dartie’s drunken scrawl from the Iseeum Club.  Soames could have wished it had not been so manifestly penned in liquor.  Just the sort of thing the Court would pitch on.  He seemed to hear the Judge’s voice say:  “You took this seriously!  Seriously enough to write him as you did?  Do you think he meant it?” Never mind!  The fact was clear that Dartie had sailed and had not returned.  Annexed also was his cabled answer:  “Impossible return.  Dartie.”  Soames shook his head.  If the whole thing were not disposed of within the next few months the fellow would turn up again like a bad penny.  It saved a thousand a year at least to get rid of him, besides all the worry to Winifred and his father.  ’I must stiffen Dreamer’s back,’ he thought; ‘we must push it on.’

Winifred, who had adopted a kind of half-mourning which became her fair hair and tall figure very well, arrived in James’ barouche drawn by James’ pair.  Soames had not seen it in the City since his father retired from business five years ago, and its incongruity gave him a shock.  ‘Times are changing,’ he thought; ‘one doesn’t know what’ll go next!’ Top hats even were scarcer.  He enquired after Val.  Val, said Winifred, wrote that he was going to play polo next term.  She thought he was in a very good set.  She added with fashionably disguised anxiety:  “Will there be much publicity about my affair, Soames?  Must it be in the papers?  It’s so bad for him, and the girls.”

With his own calamity all raw within him, Soames answered: 

“The papers are a pushing lot; it’s very difficult to keep things out.  They pretend to be guarding the public’s morals, and they corrupt them with their beastly reports.  But we haven’t got to that yet.  We’re only seeing Dreamer to-day on the restitution question.  Of course he understands that it’s to lead to a divorce; but you must seem genuinely anxious to get Dartie back—­you might practice that attitude to-day.”

Winifred sighed.

“Oh!  What a clown Monty’s been!” she said.

Soames gave her a sharp look.  It was clear to him that she could not take her Dartie seriously, and would go back on the whole thing if given half a chance.  His own instinct had been firm in this matter from the first.  To save a little scandal now would only bring on his sister and her children real disgrace and perhaps ruin later on if Dartie were allowed to hang on to them, going down-hill and spending the money James would leave his daughter.  Though it was all tied up, that fellow would milk the settlements somehow, and make his family pay through the nose to keep him out of bankruptcy or even perhaps gaol!  They left the shining carriage, with the shining horses and the shining-hatted servants on the Embankment, and walked up to Dreamer Q.C.’s Chambers in Crown Office Row.