one in the face
like a well-directed blow from a powerful fist. And they had to give the
verdict on this complex drama of Stamboul! How much they would have
to tell their wives presently! Their sense of their unusual importance
pushed through the smugness heavily, like a bulky man in broadcloth
showing through a dull crowd.

Mrs. Clarke occasionally glanced at them with an air of almost
distressed inquiry, as if she had never seen such cabbages before, and
was wondering about their gray matter. Her life in Stamboul must have
effected changes in her. She looked almost exotic in this court, despite
the simplicity of her gown, her unpretending little hat; as if her mind,
perhaps, had become exotic. But she certainly did not look wicked. Dion
was struck again by the strong mentality of her and by her haggardness.
To him she seemed definitely a woman of mind, not at all an animal
woman. When he gazed at her he felt that he was gazing at mind rather
than at body. Just before she went into the box she met his eyes. She
stared at him, as if carefully and strongly considering him; then she
nodded. He bowed, feeling uncomfortable, feeling indeed almost a brute.

"She'll think I've come out of filthy curiosity," he thought, looking
round at the greedy faces of the crowd.

No need to ask why those faces were there.

He felt still more uncomfortable when Mrs. Clarke was in the
witness-box, and Sir Edward Jeffson took up the cross-examination which
he had begun late in the afternoon of the previous day.

Dion had very seldom been in a Court of Justice, and had never before
been in the Divorce Court. As the cross-examination of Mrs. Clarke
lengthened out he felt as if his clothes, and the clothes of all the
human beings who crowded about him, were being ruthlessly stripped off,
as if an ugly and abominable nakedness were gradually appearing. The
shame of it all was very hateful to him; and yet--yes, he couldn't deny
it--there was a sort of dreadful fascination in it, too.

The two co-respondents, Hadi Bey and Aristide Dumeny of the French
Embassy in Constantinople, were in court, sitting not far from Dion, to
whom Mrs. Chetwinde, less vague than, but quite as self-possessed as,
usual, pointed them out.

Both were young men. Hadi Bey, who of course wore the fez, was a fine
specimen of the smart, alert, cosmopolitan and cultivated Turk of modern
days. There was a peculiar look of vividness and brightness about him,
in his pierci