The lawyer listened with his head aside, his eyes looking out on the sea and his white fingers combing his long brown beard, and before I had finished I could see that he too, like the Bishop, had determined to see nothing.

“You may be right,” he began. . . .

“I am right!” I answered.

“But even if you are, I am bound to tell you that adultery is not enough of itself as a ground for divorce.”

“Not enough?”

“If you were a man it would be, but being a woman you must establish cruelty as well.”

“Cruelty?  Isn’t it all cruelty?” I asked.

“In the human sense, yes; in the legal sense, no,” answered the lawyer.

And then he proceeded to explain to me that in this country, unlike some others, before a woman could obtain a divorce from her husband she had to prove that he had not only been unfaithful to her, but that he had used violence to her, struck her in the face perhaps, threatened her or endangered her life or health.

“Your husband hasn’t done that, has he?  No?  I thought not.  After all he’s a gentleman.  Therefore there is only one other ground on which you could establish a right to divorce, namely desertion, and your husband is not likely to run away.  In fact, he couldn’t.  It isn’t to his interest.  We’ve seen to all that—­here,” and smiling again, the lawyer patted the top of the lacquered box that bore my father’s name.

I was dumbfounded.  Even more degrading than the fetters whereby the Church bound me to my marriage were the terms on which the law would release me.

“But assuming that you could obtain a divorce,” said the lawyer, “what good would it do you?  You would have to relinquish your title.”

“I care nothing about my title,” I replied.

“And your position.”

“I care nothing about that either.”

“Come, come,” said the lawyer, patting my arm as if I had been an angry child on the verge of tears.  “Don’t let a fit of pique or spleen break up a marriage that is so suitable from the points of property and position.  And then think of your good father.  Why did he spend all that money in setting a ruined house on its legs again?  That he might carry on his name in a noble family, and through your children, and your children’s children. . . .”

“Then the law can do nothing for me?” I said, feeling sick and sore.

“Sorry, very sorry, but under present conditions, as far as I can yet see, nothing,” said the lawyer.

“Good-day, sir,” I said, and before he could have known what I was doing I had leapt up, left the room, and was hurrying downstairs.

My heart was in still fiercer rebellion now.  I would go home.  I would appeal to my father.  Hard as he had always been with me he was at least a man, not a cold abstraction, like the Church and the law, without bowels of compassion or sense of human suffering.