For others, however, the week had been full to the brim. Sloane's suicide and funeral had undammed a flood. The newspapers wallowed in copious details. They splashed about in the backwaters of Gilbert Sloane's personal history. They sluiced the dead man with streams of subtle vituperation, managed without singular effort to soak and soften the outer shell of his life, so that it warped and split and curled off, a spoiled and loggy reputation. Those who survived him were caught up in the backwash, and of these Delphina Sloane became of necessity the most prominent. Waves of words lapped at the shores of her grief. The Khalkis house had been converted into an impregnable lighthouse toward whose beacon the not-to-be-daunted representatives of the Press directed their barques. (The Albatross edition 1932, chapter 22, p. 201)