“Then you would advise—­”

“No, I wouldn’t.  The woman who has to be advised should never take advice.  I dare say divorce is quite as hazardous as marriage, though possibly most people divorce with a somewhat riper discretion than they marry with.  But the point is that neither marriage nor divorce can be considered a royal road to happiness, and a woman ought to get her impetus in either case from her own inner consciousness.  I should call divorcing by advice quite as silly as marrying by it.”

“But it comes at last to her own law in her own heart?”

“When she has awakened to it—­when she honestly feels it.  God’s law for woman is the same as for man—­and he has but two laws for both that are universal and unchanging:  The first is, they are bound at all times to desire happiness; the second is, that they can be happy only by being wise—­which is what we sometimes mean when we say ‘good,’ but of course no one knows what wisdom is for all, nor what goodness is for all, because we are not mechanical dolls of the same pattern.  That’s why I reverence God—­the scheme is so ingenious—­so productive of variety in goodness and wisdom.  Probably an evil marriage is as hard to be quit of as any vice.  People persist long after the sanctity has gone—­because they lack moral courage.  Hoover was quite that way with cigarettes.  If some one could only have made Jim believe that God had joined him to cigarettes, and that he mustn’t quit them or he’d shatter the foundations of our domestic integrity—­he’d have died in cheerful smoke—­very soon after a time when he says I saved his life.  All he wanted was some excuse to go on smoking.  Most people are so—­slothful-souled.  But remember, don’t advise your friend in town.  Her asking advice is a sign that she shouldn’t have it.  She is not of the coterie that Paul describes—­if you don’t mind Paul once more—­’Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.’”

There had come to the woman a vast influx of dignity—­a joyous increase in the volume of that new feeling that called to her husband.  She would have gone back, but one of the reasons would have been because she thought it “right”—­because it was what the better world did!  But now—­ah! now—­she was going unhampered by that compulsion which galls even the best.  She was free to stay away, but of her own glad, loyal will she was going back to the husband she had treated unjustly, judged by too narrow a standard.

“Allan will be so astonished and delighted,” she said, when the coupe rolled out of the train-shed.

She remembered now with a sort of pride the fine, unflinching sternness with which he had condemned divorce.  In a man of principles so staunch one might overlook many surface eccentricities.

CHAPTER XII

THE FLEXIBLE MIND OF A PLEASED HUSBAND

As they entered the little reception-room from the hall, the doors of the next room were pushed apart and they saw Allan bowing out Mrs. Talwin Covil, a meek, suppressed, neutral-tinted woman, the inevitable feminine corollary of such a man as Cyrus Browett, whose only sister she was.