just before the coffee, into mocking guesses
and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something
that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but
then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a
charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the
talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with
authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as _it_,
forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant
shock, out of temper with the general feeling.

"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner
than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive.
That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has
spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom
heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that
when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English
brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I
didn't know a single divorced person."

"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort
_must_ be single."

At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the
women not so much as the men.

"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host
inquired.

"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little
interval. "I don't just call one to mind."

"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best
society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose
disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."

"Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I'm rather proud of
the fact."

The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said,
over the length of the table (it was not very long), "I'm sure you
know some very nice people who have not been."

"Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They're of very
good family, certainly."

"You mustn't brag," the bachelor said.

A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really
more of the thing than there used to be.

"Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I'm not convinced,"
the host answered. "In a good many of the States it's been made
difficult."

The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as
to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits we