It was then in Ixopo that Paton met the love of his life, Dorrie Lusted. Because of the death of her previous husband and the attachment she still had for him, Paton and Dorrie had a very distant relationship. It was this painful relationship that often times led him to adultery himself. In the character of Stephen Kumalo, he had also been tempted once to commit adultery. It stated in his book, "and there was a third time, but that was without her knowledge, for she was away, and he had been sorely tempted to commit adultery with one of the teachers at Ndotsheni, who was weak and lonely"(Paton 305). In his novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, Stephen Kumalo goes to Johannesburg to locate his sister and his son. While he is there, he learns his sister Gertrude Kumalo has become a prostitute. Besides that, while looking for his son he meets Absalom's girlfriend, who he also thinks dirty of when asking her to come home with him. Stephen is deeply ashamed of his sister's actions. In the book, Gertrude becomes a gambler, drinker, and a prostitute. Paton may have put this in his novel to show he was also ashamed of his actions himself regarding these types of women and was showing remorse. It is obvious that Paton had to try very hard to resist sexual pleasure while married to his wife Dorrie.
In 1934, Paton suffered a severe attack of typhoid, from which he nearly died. The effects of this experience, combined with a renewed crisis in his marriage, made him determined for a change of course. He applied for a job at three of South Africa's reformatories and was appointed to the only reformatory for blacks, Diepkloof, near Johannesburg. Diepkloof started as a prison for blacks, but Paton began to believe that Deipkloof's reform could serve as a pattern for the reform of South Africa as a whole. Paton had not merely reformed Diepkloof; he himself had undergone a conversion from a harsh disciplinarian to a man who believed firmly in the superiority of love, or at any rate, of care, as an instrument of reformation and discipline.
