BY ALICE DUER MILLER

From _The Saturday Evening Post_

The Chelmsford divorce had been accomplished with the utmost decorum,
not only outwardly in the newspapers, but inwardly among a group of
intimate friends. They were a homogeneous couple--were liked by the
same people, enjoyed the same things, and held many friends in common.
These were able to say with some approach to certainty that everyone
had behaved splendidly, even the infant of twenty-three with whom
Julian had fallen in love.

Of course there will always be the question--and we used to argue it
often in those days--how well a man can behave who, after fifteen
perfectly satisfactory years of married life, admits that he has
fallen in love with another woman. But if you believe in the
clap-of-thunder theory, as I do, why, then, for a man nearing forty,
taken off his feet by a blond-headed girl, Julian, too, behaved
admirably.

As for Mrs. Julian, there was never any doubt as to her conduct. I
used to think her--and I was not alone in the opinion--the most
perfect combination of gentleness and power, and charity and humour,
that I had ever seen. She was a year or so older than Julian--though
she did not look it--and a good deal wiser, especially in the ways
of the world; and, oddly enough, one of the features that worried us
most in the whole situation was how he was ever going to get on, in
the worldly sense, without her. He was to suffer not only from the
loss of her counsel but from the lack of her indorsement. There are
certain women who are a form of insurance to a man; and Anne gave a
poise and solidity to Julian's presentation of himself which his own
flibbertigibbet manner made particularly necessary.

I think this view of the matter disturbed Anne herself, though she
was too clever to say so; or perhaps too numbed by the utter wreck
of her own life to see as clearly as usual the rocks ahead of Julian.
It was she, I believe, who first mentioned, who first thought of
divorce, and certainly she who arranged the details. Julian, still
in the more ideal stage of his emotion, had hardly wakened to the
fact that his new love was marriageable. But Mrs. Julian, with the
practical eye of her sex, saw in a flash all it might mean to him,
at his age, to begin life again with a young beauty who adored him.

She saw this, at least, as soon as she saw anything; for Julian,
like most of us when the occasion rises, developed a very pretty
power of conceal