of
an intolerable universe. For, that afternoon she had had a frightfully
painful scene with Edward.

As far as his letters went, she claimed the right to open them when she
chose. She arrogated to herself the right because Edward's affairs were
in such a frightful state and he lied so about them that she claimed the
privilege of having his secrets at her disposal. There was not, indeed,
any other way, for the poor fool was too ashamed of his lapses ever to
make a clean breast of anything. She had to drag these things out of
him.

It must have been a pretty elevating job for her. But that afternoon,
Edward being on his bed for the hour and a half prescribed by the
Kur authorities, she had opened a letter that she took to come from a
Colonel Hervey. They were going to stay with him in Linlithgowshire for
the month of September and she did not know whether the date fixed would
be the eleventh or the eighteenth. The address on this letter was,
in handwriting, as like Colonel Hervey's as one blade of corn is like
another. So she had at the moment no idea of spying on him.

But she certainly was. For she discovered that Edward Ashburnham was
paying a blackmailer of whom she had never heard something like three
hundred pounds a year... It was a devil of a blow; it was like death;
for she imagined that by that time she had really got to the bottom of
her husband's liabilities. You see, they were pretty heavy. What had
really smashed them up had been a perfectly common-place affair at Monte
Carlo--an affair with a cosmopolitan harpy who passed for the mistress
of a Russian Grand Duke. She exacted a twenty thousand pound pearl tiara
from him as the price of her favours for a week or so. It would have
pipped him a good deal to have found so much, and he was not in the
ordinary way a gambler. He might, indeed, just have found the twenty
thousand and the not slight charges of a week at an hotel with the fair
creature. He must have been worth at that date five hundred thousand
dollars and a little over. Well, he must needs go to the tables and lose
forty thousand pounds.... Forty thousand solid pounds, borrowed from
sharks! And even after that he must--it was an imperative passion--enjoy
the favours of the lady. He got them, of course, when it was a matter
of solid bargaining, for far less than twenty thousand, as he might, no
doubt, have done from the first. I daresay ten thousand dollars covered
the bill. Anyhow, there was a pr