Daventry, in wig and gown, looked tremendously legal and almost severe in his tense gravity.  Sir John Addington, his leader, a man of great fame, was less tense in his watchfulness, amazingly at his ease with the Court, and on smiling terms with the President, who, full of worldly and unworldly knowledge, held the balance of justice with an unwavering firmness.  The jury looked startlingly commonplace, smug and sleepy, despite the variety of type almost inevitably presented by twelve human beings.  Not one of them looked a rascal; not one of them looked an actively good man.  The intense Englishness of them hit one in the face like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist.  And they had to give the verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul!  How much they would have to tell their wives presently!  Their sense of their unusual importance pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth showing through a dull crowd.

Mrs. Clarke occasionally glanced at them with an air of almost distressed inquiry, as if she had never seen such cabbages before, and was wondering about their gray matter.  Her life in Stamboul must have effected changes in her.  She looked almost exotic in this court, despite the simplicity of her gown, her unpretending little hat; as if her mind, perhaps, had become exotic.  But she certainly did not look wicked.  Dion was struck again by the strong mentality of her and by her haggardness.  To him she seemed definitely a woman of mind, not at all an animal woman.  When he gazed at her he felt that he was gazing at mind rather than at body.  Just before she went into the box she met his eyes.  She stared at him, as if carefully and strongly considering him; then she nodded.  He bowed, feeling uncomfortable, feeling indeed almost a brute.

“She’ll think I’ve come out of filthy curiosity,” he thought, looking round at the greedy faces of the crowd.

No need to ask why those faces were there.

He felt still more uncomfortable when Mrs. Clarke was in the witness-box, and Sir Edward Jeffson took up the cross-examination which he had begun late in the afternoon of the previous day.

Dion had very seldom been in a Court of Justice, and had never before been in the Divorce Court.  As the cross-examination of Mrs. Clarke lengthened out he felt as if his clothes, and the clothes of all the human beings who crowded about him, were being ruthlessly stripped off, as if an ugly and abominable nakedness were gradually appearing.  The shame of it all was very hateful to him; and yet—­yes, he couldn’t deny it—­there was a sort of dreadful fascination in it, too.

The two co-respondents, Hadi Bey and Aristide Dumeny of the French Embassy in Constantinople, were in court, sitting not far from Dion, to whom Mrs. Chetwinde, less vague than, but quite as self-possessed as, usual, pointed them out.