* *

Already a change was manifest in the little community. Tabled off by
themselves sat the workers and the folk of the studios, that night.
While the guests who stayed at the inn occupied separate tables.

And there were many secret complaints about a woman they referred to as
"Dorothy" ... Dorothy had done this ... Dorothy had done that ...
Dorothy would be the ruination of "the shop" ... it would have been
better if she had never shown up at the Eos Studios....

I asked who was Dorothy....

"Don't you know ... we thought you did ... Spalton's new wife ... the
one his first wife got a divorce from him for?"

And I heard the story, part of which I knew, but not the final details.

Spalton's first wife had been an easy-going, amiable creature ... fair
and pretty in a soft, female way ... a teacher in the local Sunday
school ... one who accepted all the conventions as they were ... who
could not understand anyone not conforming to them ... life was easier
and more comfortable that way....

Spalton's originality and genius would in the end have of itself
produced a rupture between them ... few women are at home with genius,
much as they clasp their hands in ecstasy over it, as viewed on the
lecture and concert platform....

But the wedge that drove them apart was entered when his first wife,
Anne, brought into their married life, Dorothy, a fellow teacher, a
visiting friend.

Dorothy was so thin as to be stringy of body. She had a sharp
hatchet-face, eyes with the colour of ice in them ... a cold, blue-grey.

She was a woman of culture, yet at the same time she was possessed of a
great instinct for organisation and business enterprise--just what was
needed for the kind of thing Spalton was trying to inaugurate at Eos.
She fell in readily with the Master's schemes ... even with his
price-tags on objects of art, his egregious overvaluation of hand
illumined books ... which his wife, with old-fashioned honesty, rebuked
him for.

An affinity of like-mindedness grew up between Spalton and this intense,
homely woman, Dorothy ... whose face, like that of all clever, homely
women, grew to a beauty in his eyes, that mere beauty which plastic form
can never attain.

There was a local busybody of a minister, and it was he who first
intimated to the then Mrs. Spalton that her dear and intimate friend,
was betraying her....

There followed the usual spying and publicity ... Mrs. Spalton won her
divorce....