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('nmpaiiy. Gircut Britain
The
Pretty
Pickle
The Picture That Shocked the Duke Beyond Expression.
It Shows the Duchess of Westminster Doing Fancy
Figures with Felix Locher, Champion
Skater of Switzerland.
the Proud Duchess of
Westminster Has Gotten
London, April 10
H OW can a woman win back
an arrant husband’s love?
Should she try to arouse
bis jealousy?
Is she Justified in imitating bis
conduct?
These questions, which must have
exercised many a woman's heart,
receive practical answers from the
extraordinary case of the Duke and
Duchess of Westminster.
The Duke, who is the richest peer
in England, and the Ducbess, who is
the handsomest woman in English
society, have separated. The llnal
break is attributed to the Duchess’s
daring and unconventional efforts to
win back the Duke's affections. Now
that the disaster has occurred, the
greater share of the suffering and
disgrace must fall upon the woman.
The eloquent words of Scripture,
very slightly changed to fit the sex
of the person concerned, may now
be aptly applied to the Duchess of
Westminster:
“And the last state of
that woman is worse than
the first."
In other words, you
cannot get rid of one
wrong by committing an
other. Here it should be
noted that the wrong-do
ing, If It can be so-called,
attributed to the Duchess
consists merely of social
unconventioualities. No
body accuses her of go
ing to the same lengths
as her husband.
8octety still exacts a
higher standard of mor
ality from the woman than
the man. The wife and
mother who depurts In the
leBst degree from the
highest standards of pro
priety and dignity will
surely suffer.
The Duke of Westminster has
spent his whole life, since he reached
years of indiscretion, in pursuing the
phantom of pleasure. He is to-day
only thirty-four years of age. He suc
ceeded to his title ami estates when
he was twenty years old and came
into unrestrained enjoyment of the
property a year later.
He possesses 2,000 acres in the
heart of fashionable London and 40,-
000 acres in various parts of the
country. He has three palatini
houses, in none of which he lives
He enjoys an income of at least
$5,000,000 a year.
With his devotion to pleasure, he
ndngles a strong interest in polo.
This is the serious side of his life.
He will come to the United States
next Summer to watch the training
of the polo team that is coming to
play the Americans for the Interna
tional cup.
In 1900 he became engaged to the
beautiful Miss Shelagh West, daugh
ter of Colonel and Mrs. Cornwallis
West, the latter of whom was a
great ornament of the old, gay
Prince of Wales's set. The Wests
have another daughter, the Princess
of Pless, w ho is equally beautiful.
Immediately after his engagement
the Duke went to the Boer war, and
there he lost no time in becoming
entangled with a notorious charmer.
Miss West nearing of this, the en
gagement was interrupted, but it was
patched up again and the marriage
occurred in 1901.
Married life had only just started
when the Duke began to neglect his
wife and his domestic duties. He
preferred the society of sporting men
and women of the stage to that of
his ow n class. He w as rarely seen in
his own houses. Eaton Hall, built
by his grandfather, is the largest
nodern house in England. This
place has been practically closed for
several years. The King and Queen
wished to pay a visit to the mansion,
the home of one of their greatest
nobles, but the Duke cleverly evaded
the honor because he would have
had to appear with his wife.
Grosvenor House, their London
residence, in the heart of the West
minster estate, has also been much
neglected. When the Duchess was
giving a dinner party and reception
Herself in All Because
Honored Way of
“Making Him Jealous”
She Tried the
Time=
at the great house the Duke would
be entertaining a merry party at the
Gaiety. Sometimes the explanation
was given that the Duke had been
called abroad on business.
The Duke was a particularly en
thusiastic admirer of Miss Gertie
Millar, one of the liveliest stars of
the Gaiety Theatre. He had no hesl-
The Duke in the Polo Field.
Patron of Polo
tation in showing himself with his
theatrical friend in places where he
could be seen by the Duchess and
the women of his family.
The Duke and Duchess maintained
an unhappy and interrupted family
life until about three years ago. They
have two children. Lady Ursula
Grosvenor, aged eleven, and Lady
Mary, aged three. For the past three
years the Duke has made no pretense
of caring about his lovely wife. He
has wandered all over Europe with
out his wife and pursued every kind
of adventure without the least regard
for the woman who bore his name.
The Duchess was deeply hurt and
angered by her husband's conduct,
as nearly any wife would have been.
She was particularly piqued to see
that he appeared to be enjoying his
Bohemian mode of life thoroughly.
In painful self-examination she asked
herself the reason of his neglect. She
felt sure that she was handsomer
than any of the plebeian women in
whose society he took so much pleas
ure. She asked several persons
about this point and received reas
suring answers.
Then what was the reason? It
could only be that these women were
livelier, more amusing, more fascin
ating than she.
The Duchess determined to show-
them how fascinating she could be.
She would captivate all the men of
her set just as much as Gertie Millar
or Monna Delza had ever done. She
would make them rave over her and
fill her husband with jealousy.
She organized amateur theatricals.
She seeured a little one-act play
called “Scaramouche," in which she
played the part of a harutn scarum
tomboy girl. Most of the time she
wore a sweater and a skirt that came
only to her knees and displayed an
extremely shapely pair of underpin
nings. She leaped ovcu urdyes. slid
down the banisters, <• . led through
windows, put her feet on the cl-
He Is the Greatest
in iingland.
piece, smoked cigarettes—in short,
did nearly everything a Duchess
would not be expected to do.
The piece was the success she had
aimed at. One young man said to
another:
• Why, deah boy, this is almost as
good as Gertie Millar in ’The Spring
Chicken "
It was really quite a triumph fo.r a
Duchess to be almost as good as a
musical comedy specialist In her own
line.
The Duke was too busy with af
fairs of his own to notice this per
formance at the time. Then the
Duchess went away to Murren, in
Switzerland, and engaged in the snow-
sports for which that resort is fa
mous.
She skied, she tobogganed, she
skated. She took perilous leaps In
the air and displayed the same
shapeliness that had won so much
appreciation at the amateur theatri
cals.
She was caught In a perilous up
set while toboganutng and again
aroused admiration.
As a skater 6he was a revelation.
She became the favorite pupil of the
professional instructor at Murren.
She was photographed hand In hand
with him over and over again per
forming most intricate and dlfHcult
movements.
It was these photographs that
caused the break. The Duke was
ftirious when he saw them. He was
not jealous, as his wife thought he
might be. He was most righteously
indignant.
"No lady would be photographed
in such a pose as this,” he said, an
grily, to his lawyer, ‘it is most un
dignified and immodest. To think
that a Duchess of Westminster
should be photographed hand In
hand with a common, professional
athlete is simply shocking. . What
would my dear grandmother, who
s srch a friend of Queen Victoria,
iliink of it? I am indeed glad she is
j— - —
Odd, Troublesome Ghosts of the South Pacific— francis dwyek
F AIRIES have a recognized habit, hut
ghosts are universal. The spectre
knows neither latitude nor longi
tude. One coujd not hope to gather in a
fairy on a South Sea a toll or a desert
stretch in inland Australia, but the haunt
ing spectre is to be met with in either
place.
The ghost crops up everywhere. The
Australian aboriginal, the Fijian, Maori.
Papuan, Dyak, Javanese, Kling and Rara-
tongan have a mass of ghost lore that
would take the Psychical Research Society
a thousand years to investigate. Heat stirs
the imagination, and the hot lands are
particularly prolific in breeding stories of
the supernatural.
1 was born on the borders of a region
that is supposed to be one of the weirdest
places on the earth. That place is the
Never Never country, in inland Australia,
a land of drought and heat—the God-for
gotten land of Despair.
Here the ghost yarn flourishes. Stock-
men tell the story of the coach of death
that runs nightly through the sun-smitten
lauds where the white-eyed crow follows
the bushman who is lost on the wastes.
The coach is pulled by six black horses,
whose driver never speaks, and into the
coach go the souls of the lost stockmen
and “swagmen” who died of want of water.
We were going from New Castle to Syd
ney one night in a schooner, when the
man at the w-heel unloosed a yell that
could havq been heard at the Nobbys that
was a score of leagues astern. The whole
crew rushed in his direction, and the
frightened, stammering sailor asserted that
a cat, black and shining, with two eyes
that v gllttered like the emerald eyes, of the
sleeping Buddha, had walked six times
round him as he stood at his post.
"Three times in one direction and three
times in another,” said the sailor.
"Why the dickens didn't you kick her?”
asked the captain.
“Kick her?" gasped the sailor. “Do you
think I'd kick her? Not on your life!
When all your mob came running here
she beat it over the side.”
There was no cat on the schooner, so
the captain cursed the steersman and went
back tc his cabin.
Three minutes afterward another and
mightier yell came from the deck, and the
captain and crew again rushed to the
scene. The steersman was lying fiat on
his back unconscious, and when he had
been brought uround he asserted that he
had kicked the spectral puss on its second
appearance and had been promptly knocked
unconscious by what he described as “a
bloomin’ electric shock that came from the
durned old mouse eater's fur!”
The captain cursed him and took the
wheel himself, and quiet was again re
stored. But not for long. The captain's
yell w-as even louder and more hair-raising
than that of the steersman, and when the
crew- reached -bis side they found -him
fighting madly with an invisible foe.
‘‘Hit him!” he shrieked. “He’s sitting
on the wheel. Hit him, you fools! The
cat! The cat!”
Three hours latei we piled the schooner
on a reef, and we had a narrow squeak
for our lives.
Au island skipper, on a run from Suva
to Melbourne, ill-treated a Fijian. The
black died, but before he died he lifted
himself on his elbow and spat upon the
captain's uniform. The Fijian w-as some
thing of a watch-doctor in his own corner
of the world, and that captain immediately'
struck trouble. The night after the Fijian
expired, the door of the skipper's cabin
was struck seven hard blows at midnight—
blows that seemed as if they were admin-
tered, with a sledge-hammer. The captain
sprang from his berth, but there was no
one at the door. At two bells the thing
was repeated, and again at four bells. The
captain was ready at the Iasi visit. He
pumped five bullets through the thin panel
of the closed door, but when he dashed
into the passage there was no quarry to
reward his marksmanship.
The game continued for seven days, then
a companion of the dead Fijian guaranteed
to kill the ghost if the captain gave him
two pounds ten shillings. The captain
paid, and the fuzzy-headed native imme
diately asked to have pointed out to him
the spot where the dead man had spat
upon the coat. This was done and the
ghost-killer cut the portion out and burnt
it on the deck! The door-knocking ghos!
never returned!
Miss Gertie Millar, of the
Gaiety Theatre, Whose In
fluence Over the Duke
Made the Duchess
“Instead of having his jealousy aroused by the
Duchess’s pranks, the Duke was deeply
indignant and ordered her out of
his house.”
Try to Arouse His
Jealousy.
spent in social amusements this is a
severe punishment.
Most certainly, the Queen will not
receive her at court and Her Majes
ty’s example will be followed by the
leaders of the nobility and all those
important persons who take their
cue from the Sovereign's authorita
tive consort. This means that the
Duchess will either ha-e to go with
out society at all or drift into the
cosmopolitan Bohemian set who ar
not so strict in their standards. That
will be a tragedy for a Duchess of
Westminster. The separation is re
garded as a social calamity of the
first magnitude by the Queen and all
who are In agreement with her. It
will strengthen the attacks of those
politicians who are now seeking to
abolish the hereditary element in the
House of Lords and cut down the in
comes of the great landowners by
new- forms of taxation. The Duke
of Westminster is the man most
particularly aimed at in Lloyd-
George’s last land taxation scheme.
Undoubtedly, the affair comes at a
bad time. It is hard to defend the
conduct of a young man and woman
enjoying health, strength and every
luxury that money can give who will
not live together quietly and decent
ly, as law and morality re
quire, but must fly apart,
each pursuing pleasure In
his or her own peculiar
way.
‘‘Why should I labor to
support this idler?” asks
the laborer in the fields
around deserted Eaton
Hall. ‘‘I do not run away
from my wife and chil
dren. Why should I not
use my vote to gain pos
session of the land which I am work
ing and which he does not want?"
Thus from all classes of society
most bitter roudemautlon falls upon
the quarrelling Duke and Duchess.
no longer here to suffer this cruel
blow."
The Duke, in fact, took the most
narrow, cld-fashioned view of moral
ity and ethics for women only. His
own conduct did not influence his
judgment in the least.
The Duke and Duchess had already
talked about separation. He seized
this occasion to bring about an open
rupture and put his wife in the wrong
before a large element of society.
He actually ordered her out of his
house and she made a spirited reply.
Terms of separation were then drawn
up, under which the Duchess received
$70,000 a year, the house in London
and the second country house, Halkin
House, in Flintshire. The Duke re
tains the great bulk of his income
and liberty to do as he pleases.
Queen Mary is especially severe
upon the young Duchess for „er con
duct, although before the rupture
she sympathized with her in the suf
fering caused by her husband’s neg
lect. The Queen holds
very strongly that it is
the duty of a woman to
maintain her self-control
and the integrity of her
home under all conditions,
no matter how her hus
band may neglect her or
provoke her.
The Queen will not for
a moment admit that a
woman may answer her
husband’s indiscretions by
imitating them or pretend
ing to imitate them. It
is her duty to maintain the strict
est standard of virtue in the inter
ests of her descendants and the
race. If her husband goes astray It
becomes all the more the wife's duty
The Duchess of Westminster as Herself.
to set an example of right conduct in
order to lead him back to the straight
path.
A surprising number of persons in
all classes of society agree with the
Queen's views. From present indi
cations, it appears that the Duchess
will suffer ostracism in the most in
fluential circles of society. For one
whose life has been almost entirely
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