“Oh, yes, John, I will go up and talk with Lillie, and condole with her; and perhaps we shall bring her round.  And then when my husband comes home next week, we’ll have a family palaver, and he will find some ways and means of setting this business straight, that it won’t be so bad as it looks now.  There may be arrangements made when the creditors come together.  My impression is that, whenever people find a man really determined to arrange a matter of this kind honorably, they are all disposed to help him; so don’t be cast down about the business.  As for Lillie’s discontent, treat it as you would the crying of your little daughter for its sugar-plums, and do not expect any thing more of her just now than there is.”

* * * * *

We have brought our story up to this point.  We informed our readers in the beginning that it was not a novel, but a story with a moral; and, as people pick all sorts of strange morals out of stories, we intend to put conspicuously into our story exactly what the moral of it is.

Well, then, it has been very surprising to us to see in these our times that some people, who really at heart have the interest of women upon their minds, have been so short-sighted and reckless as to clamor for an easy dissolution of the marriage-contract, as a means of righting their wrongs.  Is it possible that they do not see that this is a liberty which, once granted, would always tell against the weaker sex?  If the woman who finds that she has made a mistake, and married a man unkind or uncongenial, may, on the discovery of it, leave him and seek her fortune with another, so also may a man.  And what will become of women like Lillie, when the first gilding begins to wear off, if the man who has taken one of them shall be at liberty to cast her off and seek another?  Have we not enough now of miserable, broken-winged butterflies, that sink down, down, down into the mud of the street?  But are women-reformers going to clamor for having every woman turned out helpless, when the man who has married her, and made her a mother, discovers that she has not the power to interest him, and to help his higher spiritual development?  It was because woman is helpless and weak, and because Christ was her great Protector, that he made the law of marriage irrevocable.  “Whosoever putteth away his wife causeth her to commit adultery.”  If the sacredness of the marriage-contract did not hold, if the Church and all good men and all good women did not uphold it with their might and main, it is easy to see where the career of many women like Lillie would end.  Men have the power to reflect before the choice is made; and that is the only proper time for reflection.  But, when once marriage is made and consummated, it should be as fixed a fact as the laws of nature.  And they who suffer under its stringency should suffer as those who endure for the public good.  “He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not, he shall enter into the tabernacle of the Lord.”