But later on in the case she found that Mr Brand had to
confess to a "guilty intimacy" with some one or other. Nancy
imagined that he must have been telling some one his wife's
secrets; she could not understand why that was a serious offence.
Of course it was not very gentlemanly--it lessened her opinion of
Mrs Brand. But since she found that Mrs Brand had condoned that
offence, she imagined that they could not have been very serious
secrets that Mr Brand had told. And then, suddenly, it was forced
on her conviction that Mr Brand--the mild Mr Brand that she had
seen a month or two before their departure to Nauheim, playing
"Blind Man's Buff" with his children and kissing his wife when he
caught her--Mr Brand and Mrs Brand had been on the worst
possible terms. That was incredible.
Yet there it was--in black and white. Mr Brand drank; Mr Brand
had struck Mrs Brand to the ground when he was drunk. Mr Brand
was adjudged, in two or three abrupt words, at the end of columns
and columns of paper, to have been guilty of cruelty to his wife
and to have committed adultery with Miss Lupton. The last words
conveyed nothing to Nancy--nothing real, that is to say.
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