instructed. And there was no defence to
prepare. There was only his bare word, only his flat denial--denial
flat, unprofitable, and totally unsupported. The only person who could
support it was the girl, and she was dead: she was much worse than dead:
she had died in atrocious circumstances, his part in which had earned
him the severe censure of the coroner's jury. His defence couldn't have
been worse. He'd tied himself in damning knots ever since he'd first set
eyes on the girl, and all he could bring to untie them was simply to
say, 'It wasn't so.' His defence was as bad as if he were to stand up
before the Divorce Court and say, 'Before she died the girl wrote and
signed a statement exonerating me and fixing the paternity on so-and-so.
He's dead, too, that so-and-so, and as for her signed statement, I'm
sorry to say I destroyed it, forgetting I should need it in this suit. I
was worried about something else at the time, and I quite forgot this
and I destroyed it.'

"I don't say his defence would be quite so crudely insulting to the
intelligence of the court as that; but I say the whole unsupported
twisting and turning and writhing and wriggling of it was not far short
of it.

"Well, that was how I figured it out to myself in those days, as the
case came along for hearing; and I said to myself: Was I going to put in
affidavits for a stay of hearing for the pleasure of seeing him nursed
back to life to go through that agony and ordeal of the inquest again
and come out with the same result as if he hadn't been there at all? And
I decided--no; no, thanks; not me. It was too much like patching up a
dying man in a civilised country for the pleasure of hanging him, or
like fatting up a starving man in a cannibal country for the
satisfaction of eating him.

"And I had this. In further support of my position I had this. My
friend, the Divorce Court is a cynical institution. If a respondent and
a corespondent have been in places and in circumstances where they might
have incriminated themselves, the Divorce Court cynically assumes that,
being human, they would have incriminated themselves. 'But,' it says to
the petitioner, 'I want proof, definite and satisfactory proof of those
places and of those circumstances. That's what I want. That's what
you've got to give me.'

"Very well. Listen to me attentively. Lend me your ears. The onus of
that proof rests on the petitioner. Because a case is undefended, it
doesn't for one s