“Then it is a disease!” I cried.  And I can remember just how frightened I felt.  “But isn’t there any doctor anywhere that can stop it?”

He shook his head and gave that queer little laugh again.

“I’m afraid not,” he sighed.  “As for it’s being a disease—­there are people that call it a disease, and there are others who call it a cure; and there are still others who say it’s a remedy worse than the disease it tries to cure.  But, there, you baby!  What am I saying?  Come, come, my dear, just forget it.  It’s nothing you should bother your little head over now.  Wait till you’re older.”

Till I’m older, indeed!  How I hate to have folks talk to me like that!  And they do—­they do it all the time.  As if I was a child now, when I’m almost standing there where the brook and river meet!

But that was just the kind of talk I got, everywhere, nearly every time I asked any one what a divorce was.  Some laughed, and some sighed.  Some looked real worried ’cause I’d asked it, and one got mad.  (That was the dressmaker.  I found out afterward that she’d had a divorce already, so probably she thought I asked the question on purpose to plague her.) But nobody would answer me—­really answer me sensibly, so I’d know what it meant; and ’most everybody said, “Run away, child,” or “You shouldn’t talk of such things,” or, “Wait, my dear, till you’re older”; 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 unmarries 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.”