She found it highly entertaining.
Such things haven't come her way before."
"I should hope not, indeed," said Griffith warmly.
"And anyway," I said firmly, "that's the best way to take it, I think.
As something utterly ridiculous."
"Yes," said Owen Griffith, "only -"
He stopped, and I chimed in quickly.
"Quite so," I said.
"Only is the word!"
"The trouble is," he said, "that this sort of thing, once it starts, grows."
"So I should imagine."
"It's pathological, of course."
I nodded. "Any idea who's behind it?" I asked.
"No, I wish I had.
You see, the anonymous letter pest arises from one of two causes.
Either it's particular - directed at one person or set of people, that is to say it's motivated, it's someone who's got a definite grudge (or thinks he has) and who chooses a particularly nasty and underhand way of working it off.
It's mean and disgusting but it's not necessarily crazy, and it's usually fairly easy to trace the writer - a discharged servant, a jealous woman, and so on.
But if it's general, and not particular, then it's more serious.
"The letters are sent indiscriminately and serve the purpose of working off some frustration in the writer's mind.
As I say, it's definitely pathological.
And the craze grows.
In the end, of course, you track down the person in question - (it's often someone extremely unlikely) and that's that.
There was a bad outburst of that kind over the other side of the county last year - turned out to be the head of the millinery department in a big draper's establishment. Quiet, refined woman - had been there for years.
"I remember something of the same kind in my last practice up north.
But that turned out to be purely personal spite.
Still, as I say, I've seen something of this kind of thing, and, quite frankly, it frightens me!"
"Has it been going on long?" I asked.
"I don't think so.
Hard to say, of course, because people who get these letters don't go round advertising the fact.
They put them in the fire."
He paused.
"I've had one myself.
Symmington, the solicitor, he's had one.
And one or two of my poorer patients have told me about them."
"All much the same sort of thing?"
"Oh, yes. A definite harping on the sex theme.
That's always a feature."
He grinned.
"Symmington was accused of illicit relations with his lady clerk - poor old Miss Ginch, who's forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit.
Symmington took it straight to the police.
My letters accused me of violating professional decorum with my lady patients, stressing the details.
They're all quite childish and absurd, but horribly venomous."
His face changed, grew grave.
"But all the same, I'm afraid.
These things can be dangerous, you know."
"I suppose they can."
"You see," he said, "crude, childish-spite though it is, sooner or later one of these letters will hit the mark.
And then, God knows what may happen!
I'm afraid, too, of the effect upon the slow, suspicious, uneducated mind.
If they see a thing written, they believe it's true.