She raged
against the world's law, the injustice by which a husband's cruelty was
not sufficient ground for divorce. 'But we finer souls must take the law
into our own hands,' she wrote. 'We must teach society that the ethics
of a barbarous age are unfitted for our century of enlightenment.' But
somehow the actual time and place of the elopement could never get
itself fixed. In September her husband dragged her to Scotland, in
October after the pheasants. When the dramatic day was actually fixed,
Winifred wrote by the next post deferring it for a week. Even the few
actual preliminary meetings they planned for Kensington Gardens or
Hampstead Heath rarely came off. He lived in a whirling atmosphere of
express letters of excuse, and telegrams that transformed the situation
from hour to hour. Not that her passion in any way abated, or her
romantic resolution really altered: it was only that her conception of
time and place and ways and means was dizzily mutable.
But after nigh six months of palpitating negotiations with the adorable
Mrs. Glamorys, the poet, in a moment of dejection, penned the prose
apophthegm, 'It is of no use trying to change a changeable person.
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