no interest in the
matter your lady is carrying on with a foreigner--"

Reaching that word Soames stopped mechanically and examined the postmark.
So far as he could pierce the impenetrable disguise in which the Post
Office had wrapped it, there was something with a "sea" at the end and a
"t" in it. Chelsea? No! Battersea? Perhaps! He read on.

"These foreigners are all the same. Sack the lot. This one meets your
lady twice a week. I know it of my own knowledge--and to see an
Englishman put on goes against the grain. You watch it and see if what I
say isn't true. I shouldn't meddle if it wasn't a dirty foreigner that's
in it. Yours obedient."

The sensation with which Soames dropped the letter was similar to that he
would have had entering his bedroom and finding it full of black-beetles.
The meanness of anonymity gave a shuddering obscenity to the moment. And
the worst of it was that this shadow had been at the back of his mind
ever since the Sunday evening when Fleur had pointed down at Prosper
Profond strolling on the lawn, and said: "Prowling cat!" Had he not in
connection therewith, this very day, perused his Will and Marriage
Settlement? And now this anonymous ruffian, with nothing to gain,
apparently, save the venting of his spite against foreigners, had
wrenched it out of the obscurity in which he had hoped and wished it
would remain. To have such knowledge forced on him, at his time of life,
about Fleur's mother I He picked the letter up from the carpet, tore it
across, and then, when it hung together by just the fold at the back,
stopped tearing, and reread it. He was taking at that moment one of the
decisive resolutions of his life. He would not be forced into another
scandal. No! However he decided to deal with this matter--and it
required the most far-sighted and careful consideration he would do
nothing that might injure Fleur. That resolution taken, his mind answered
the helm again, and he made his ablutions. His hands trembled as he
dried them. Scandal he would not have, but something must be done to
stop this sort of thing! He went into his wife's room and stood looking
around him. The idea of searching for anything which would incriminate,
and entitle him to hold a menace over her, did not even come to him.
There would be nothing--she was much too practical. The idea of having
her watched had been dismissed before it came--too well he remembered his
previous experience of that.