Either way, the catastrophe came in the middle of the writing of VileBodies, when the socially active She-Evelyn confessed that she had fallen in love with another man, John Heygate.
Resuming VileBodies, he took a more vengeful course that would indict the fallen, feckless world that had betrayed him. (He would later, in A Handful of Dust, more roundly and explicitly indict his ex-wife).