I hope you haven't got the impression that I didn't like Mrs. Cunningham. Indeed, if half I presently learned about her was true, it would have been a hard heart that had not shown a very real and compassionate consideration for her. Young as she was, she had had a wretched story. As far as I know it it was this:—

The late George Cunningham, having contracted the dangerous habit of going to bed every night comparatively sober and waking up in the morning very drunk, had one day arrived at the point when something had had to be done about it. I assume that he had tried the usual specifics to no purpose, since he had presently found himself with only two alternatives left. The first of these was to have done with specifics, to go boldly forward, and to trust to the strength of his constitution to land him high, and still dry, among the seasoned octogenarians. The other was to marry, and to trust that the pure love of an innocent young girl might work its traditional miracle.

Unfortunately, instead of choosing he had tried both courses at once. An unjailed criminal of a father had either suggested the match himself or had failed to throw Cunningham out of the window when it had been suggested. So at seventeen-and-a-half Audrey Herbert had become the wife of a man-about-town of forty-two, with a roomy house in St. John's Wood, a considerable private fortune, and a hole in every one of his pockets.

It had not taken Mrs. Cunningham long to discover that a man who goes to bed sober and wakes up drunk, frequently does so in other beds than his own. But her father, to whom she ran, advised her to continue to exercise her influence for good. He seems to have thought that as long as Cunningham did not actually strike her the rest must be accepted as part of marriage-as-it-is. He had passed out of the world in that belief a couple of years after his daughter's immolation.

Cunningham never struck her. Nor, while it lasted, did he starve her of money. Twice, when housekeeping debts had pressed, he gave her blank checks which the bank duly honored. The third time (one of his mistresses appears to have been the occasion) he gave her a considerably wider permission.... No, he had never struck her. Instead he had merely dragged through the mud of alcoholism and unfaithfulness the hope and belief in men he had found her with, and after five years of it had died—not a day too soon, as she had discovered on going into his affairs. When his debts of honor, dishonor and at law had been paid, about a hundred pounds had remained. With this, her clothes, a few pieces of furniture bought in from the sale and her experience of married life, she had become her own mistress again at twenty-three. Most of the hundred pounds had gone in fees at a School of Dramatic Art. She was now twenty-seven and on the eve of her second marriage.

I am telling you all this because of the part that Mrs. Cunningham presently came to play in our Case. I think her unhappy history partly explained certain things. I would not go so far as to say that with the exception of Monty Rooke she disliked and distrusted all men, but I think that the sense of sex-hostility was latent and instinctive in her. This never took the form of gloom. Quite the other way. Lest it should be thought for a moment that she mourned for the cur with whom she had been kenneled, she was rather histrionically bright. She fell naturally into beautiful attitudes and gestures, which beauty her art enhanced. I think I mentioned the care she bestowed on her manicuring; in the whole of her person and dress she was the same, as if to wipe out some soilure. She was undoubtedly much in love with Monty—who at any rate was a teetotaller. And, except as I have qualified, I think she liked the rest of us well enough. But the history was always behind, and, in my experience, if you like with however natural a reservation, there is something of the same reserve in the liking you inspire.

So in this sense I was prepared to like Mrs. Cunningham, and without any qualification whatever was sorry she had had so ghastly a time and hopeful that her marriage with Monty would expunge the memory of it.