uld have him reason with
them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to
a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would
quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not,
he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think
it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them,
and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three
months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for
the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should
marry them, and let them take the consequences."

The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host
with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much
frightened. He said: "I don't see anything so original in all that.
It's merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce."

"And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher
civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all
approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the
divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent
nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all."

"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the
one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the
parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid _them_ all hope
of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"

"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on
the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in),
"wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all
the marriages as we have them now?"

"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said,
let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if
these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of
relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there
are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."

"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.

"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things--the nature of
men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be
very seriously considered as a cause."

"Yes?"

"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye,
"difference of sex."

The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of percep