s.

"Divorce is a nice smushy poultice that may help but won't heal," cut
in a new voice.

"Divorce is a guidepost marked, 'Hell to Heaven,' but lots of folks
miss the way, just the same, I notice," spoke up somebody with a
chuckle.

"Divorce is a coward's retreat from the battle of life." Captain
Harris said this. He spoke slow and decided. Captain Harris is old and
rich and not married. He's the hotel's star boarder, and what he says,
goes, 'most always. But it didn't this time. I can remember just how
old Mr. Carlton snapped out the next.

"Speak from your own experience, Tom Harris, an' I'm thinkin' you
ain't fit ter judge. I tell you divorce is what three fourths of the
husbands an' wives in the world wish was waitin' for 'em at home this
very night. But it ain't there." I knew, of course, he was thinking of
his wife. She's some cross, I guess, and has two warts on her nose.

There was more, quite a lot more, said. But I've forgotten the rest.
Besides, they weren't talking to me then, anyway. So I picked up my
thread and slipped out of the store, glad to escape. But, as I said
before, I didn't find many like them.

Of course I know now--what divorce is, I mean. And it's all settled.
They granted us some kind of a decree or degree, and we're going to
Boston next Monday.

It's been awful, though--this last year. First we had to go to that
horrid place out West, and stay ages and ages. And I hated it. Mother
did, too. I know she did. I went to school, and there were quite a lot
of girls my age, and some boys; but I didn't care much for them. I
couldn't even have the fun of surprising them with the divorce we were
going to have. I found _they_ were going to have one, too--every last
one of them. And when everybody has a thing, you know there's no
particular fun in having it yourself. Besides, they were very unkind
and disagreeable, and bragged a lot about their divorces. They said
mine was tame, and had no sort of snap to it, when they found Mother
didn't have a lover waiting in the next town, or Father hadn't run off
with his stenographer, or nobody had shot anybody, or anything.

That made me mad, and I let them see it, good and plain. I told them
our divorce was perfectly all right and genteel and respectable; that
Nurse Sarah said it was. Ours was going to be incompatibility, for
one thing, which meant that you got on each other's nerves, and just
naturally didn't care for each other any more. But they on