der"; and all that.

Oh, how I hate such talk when I really want to know something! How
do they expect us to get our education if they won't answer our
questions?

I don't know which made me angriest--I mean angrier. (I'm speaking of
two things, so I must, I suppose. I hate grammar!) To have them talk
like that--not answer me, you know--or have them do as Mr. Jones, the
storekeeper, did, and the men there with him.

It was one day when I was in there buying some white thread for Nurse
Sarah, and it was a little while after I had asked the doctor if a
divorce was a disease. Somebody had said something that made me think
you could buy divorces, and I suddenly determined to ask Mr. Jones if
he had them for sale. (Of course all this sounds very silly to me now,
for I know that a divorce is very simple and very common. It's just
like a marriage certificate, only it _un_marries you instead of
marrying you; but I didn't know it then. And if I'm going to tell this
story I've got to tell it just as it happened, of course.)

Well, I asked Mr. Jones if you could buy divorces, and if he had them
for sale; and you ought to have heard those men laugh. There were six
of them sitting around the stove behind me.

"Oh, yes, my little maid" (above all things I abhor to be called a
little maid!) one of them cried. "You can buy them if you've got money
enough; but I don't reckon our friend Jones here has got them for
sale."

Then they all laughed again, and winked at each other. (That's another
disgusting thing--_winks_ when you ask a perfectly civil question! But
what can you do? Stand it, that's all. There's such a lot of things
we poor women have to stand!) Then they quieted down and looked
very sober--the kind of sober you know is faced with laughs in the
back--and began to tell me what a divorce really was. I can't remember
them all, but I can some of them. Of course I understand now that
these men were trying to be smart, and were talking for each other,
not for me. And I knew it then--a little. We know a lot more things
sometimes than folks think we do. Well, as near as I can remember it
was like this:

"A divorce is a knife that cuts a knot that hadn't ought to ever been
tied," said one.

"A divorce is a jump in the dark," said another.

"No, it ain't. It's a jump from the frying-pan into the fire," piped
up Mr. Jones.

"A divorce is the comedy of the rich and the tragedy of the poor,"
said a little man who wore glasse