“I will be everything to them until they are—­say, ten and twelve,” she added on another day, “and then they will begin to turn toward their father.  Of course I can’t blame him to them, Alice.  And some day they will come to believe that it is all their mother’s fault—­that’s the way with children!  And so I’ll pay again.”

“Dearest girl, you’re morbid!” Alice said, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

“No, I mean it, I truly mean that!  It is disillusioning for young boys to learn that their father and mother were not self-controlled, normal persons, able to bear the little pricks of life, but that our history has been public gossip for years, that two separate divorces are in their immediate history!”

“Rachael, don’t talk so recklessly!”

Rachael smiled sadly.

“Well, perhaps I can be a good mother to them, even if they don’t idealize me!” she mused.

“I have come to this conclusion,” she told

Alice one day, about a fortnight later, “while civilization is as it is, divorce is wrong.  No matter what the circumstances are, no matter where the right and wrong lie, divorce is wrong.”

“I suppose there are cases of drink or infidelity—­” Alice submitted mildly.

“Then it’s the drink, or the infidelity that should be changed!” Rachael answered inflexibly.  “It’s the one vow we take with God as witness; and no blessing ever follows a broken vow!”

“I think myself that there are not many marriages that couldn’t be successes!” Alice said thoughtfully.

“Separation, if you like!” Rachael conceded with something of her old bright energy.  “Change and absence, for weeks and months, but not divorce.  Paula Verlaine should never have divorced Clarence; she made a worse match, if that was possible, and involved three other small lives in the general discomfort.  And I never should have married Clarence, because I didn’t love him.  I didn’t want children then; I never felt that the arrangement was permanent; but having married him, I should have stayed by him.  I know the mood in which Clarence took his own life; he never loved me as he did Bill, but he wouldn’t have done it if I had been there!”

“I cannot consider Clarence Breckenridge a loss to society,” Alice said.

“I might have made Clarence a man who would have been a loss to society,” Rachael mused.  “He was proud; loved to be praised.  And he loved children; one or two babies in the nursery would have put Billy in second place.  But he bored me, and I simply wouldn’t go on being bored.  So that if I had had a little more courage, or a little more prudence in the first place, Billy, Clarence, perhaps Charlotte and Charlie, Greg, Deny, Jim, Joe Pickering, and Billy might all have been happier, to say nothing of the general example to society.”

“I hear that Billy is unhappy enough now,” Alice said, pleased at Rachael’s unusual vivacity.  “Isabella Haviland told my Mary that Cousin Billy was talking about divorce.”