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 glasses.

“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.