rtain time--weeks or months--the
magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If
they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist
in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and
are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they
choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."

"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said,
as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no
one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that
it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to
come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the
original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse
their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there
out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not
at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are
usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend"
them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence;
and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives,
when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and
report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to
their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head
of the table.

"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable
evil?"

The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and
then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and
she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken
a liberty with this man's wife), "Why, don't we?"

"About one in seven of us doesn't," the stop-gap said.

"Oh!" the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which
seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. "Is it so bad as that?"

"Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all," he returned, and the
hostess smiled gratefully at the girl for drawing his fire. But it
appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the
hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least
able to contend with adverse opinions.

"No, I don't believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we
think marriage is so." Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended,
no doubt, and he "held them with his gl