Kate Sprague retreated to Europe and then returned to Washington; she spent such money as she could get from her husband, and she began an increasingly public affair with Conkling. The romance enraged William, who in drunken spite dragged out and burned their expensive furniture on the lawn of his estate and threatened to throw his wife out a second-story window. It all hit the newspapers in the summer of 1879 when he unexpectedly returned home from a trip and found that Conkling was his wife’s guest at the Spragues’ summer home in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Sprague drove him out and
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