Shortly after Katherine’s death Murry married Violet le Maistre, a girl who was Katherine’s physical double and who also had ambitions as a writer. Violet was very young for her age - the product of a sheltered childhood. In an uncanny echo of his meeting with Katherine, Murry met Violet when she submitted some stories for the literary magazine he was then editing. He liked them and lent her a collection of Chekhov’s stories to read. A few days later he invited her to dinner, ostensibly to meet his younger brother Richard and it was then that she confessed to Murry that she had already fallen in love with him. Always susceptible, Murry succumbed to her adoration and gave her Katherine’s pearl ring to symbolise their engagement. Their first home, the Old Coastguard Station at Abbotsbury in Dorset, was bought with royalties from Katherine’s books. The furniture too was Katherine’s. Not surprisingly Violet was unhappy. The idyllic marriage she had imagined became something else. Her daughter wrote later that ‘My mother felt lost. Deeply in love with my father, she . . . found in this kind and loving man . . . a preoccupation with worlds she could not enter, that no living soul could penetrate.’