I had been rather preoccupied with my own thoughts, and paying scant attention to the clattering-tongued Struthers, up to this point. But the intimation that Lady Allie was not in the West for the sake of her health brought me up short. And Struthers, when I challenged that statement, promptly announced that the lady in question was no more in search of health than a tom-cat's in search of water and no more interested in ranching than an ox is interested in astronomy, seeing as she'd 'a' been co-respondent in the Allerby and Crewe-Buller divorce case if she'd stayed where the law could have laid a hand on her, and standing more shamed than ever when Baron Crewe-Buller shut himself up in his shooting-lodge and blew his brains out three weeks before her ladyship had sailed for America, and the papers that full of the scandal it made it unpleasant for a self-respecting lady's maid to meet her friends of a morning in Finsbury Park. And as for these newer goings-on, Struthers had seen what was happening right under her nose, she had, long before she had the chance to say so openly by word of mouth, but now that the fat was in the fire she wasn't the kind to sit by and see those she should be loyal to led about by the nose. And so forth. And so forth! For just what else the irate Struthers had to unload from her turbulent breast I never did know, since at that opportune moment Dinkie awakened and proceeded to page his parent with all the strength of his impatient young lungs.
By the time I'd attended to Dinkie and finished my sadly neglected marmalade--for humans must eat, whatever happens--I'd made an effort to get some sort of order back into my shattered world. Yet it was about Duncan more than any one else that my thoughts kept clustering and centering. He seemed, at the moment, oddly beyond either pity or blame. I thought of him as a victim of his own weakness, as the prey of a predaceous and unscrupulous woman who had intrigued and would continue to intrigue against his happiness, a woman away from her own world, a self-complacent and sensual privateer who for a passing whim, for a momentary appeasement of her exile, stood ready to sacrifice the last of his self-respect. She was self-complacent, but she was also a woman with an unmistakable physical appeal. She was undeniably attractive, as far as appearances went, and added to that attractiveness was a dangerous immediacy of attack, a touch of outlawry, which only too often wins before resistance can be organized. And Dinky-Dunk, I kept reminding myself, was at that dangerous mid-channel period of a man's life where youth and age commingle, where the monotonous middle-years slip their shackles over his shoulders and remind him that his days of dalliance are ebbing away. He awakens to the fact that romance is being left behind, that the amorous adventure which once meant so much to him must soon belong to the past, that he must settle down to his jog-trot of family life. It's the age, I suppose, when any spirited man is tempted to kick up with a good-by convulsion or two of romantic adventure, as blind as it is brief and passionate, sadly like the contortions of a rooster with its head cut off.