“The real thing!” he echoed.

“Yes.  She’s going to marry a splendid man, Eldridge Sumner.  I know the family well.  They have always stood for public spirit, and this Mr. Summer, although he is little over thirty, was chairman of that Vice Commission which made such a stir in New York a year ago.  He’s a lawyer, with a fine future, and they’re madly in love.  And Gertrude realizes now, after her experience, the true values in life.  She was only a child when she married Victor Warren.”

“But Mr. Warren,” Hodder managed to say, “is still living.”

“I sometimes wonder, Mr. Hodder,” she went on hurriedly, “whether we can realize how different the world is today from what it was twenty years ago, until something of this kind is actually brought home to us.  I shall never forget how distressed, how overwhelmed Mr. Constable and I were when Gertrude got her divorce.  I know that they are regarding such things differently in the East, but out here!—­We never dreamed that such a thing could happen to us, and we regarded it as a disgrace.  But gradually—­” she hesitated, and looked at the motionless clergyman —­“gradually I began to see Gertrude’s point of view, to understand that she had made a mistake, that she had been too young to comprehend what she was doing.  Victor Warren had been ruined by money, he wasn’t faithful to her, but an extraordinary thing has happened in his case.  He’s married again, and Gertrude tells me he’s absurdly happy, and has two children.”

As he listened, Hodder’s dominating feeling was amazement that such a course as her daughter had taken should be condoned by this middle-aged lady, a prominent member of his congregation and the wife of a vestryman, who had been nurtured and steeped in Christianity.  And not only that:  Mrs. Constable was plainly defending a further step, which in his opinion involved a breach of the Seventh Commandment!  To have invaded these precincts, the muddy, turbulent river of individualism had risen higher than he would have thought possible . . . .

“Wait!” she implored, checking his speech,—­she had been watching him with what was plainly anxiety, “don’t say anything yet.  I have a letter here which she wrote me—­at the time.  I kept it.  Let me read a part of it to you, that you may understand more fully the tragedy of it.”

Mrs. Constable thrust her hand into her lap and drew forth a thickly covered sheet.

“It was written just after she left him—­it is an answer to my protest,” she explained, and began to read: 

“I know I promised to love Victor, mother, but how can one promise to do a thing over which one has no control?  I loved him after he stopped loving me.  He wasn’t a bit suited to me—­I see that now—­he was attracted by the outside of me, and I never knew what he was like until I married him.  His character seemed to change completely; he grew morose and quick-tempered and secretive, and nothing I did pleased him.  We led a cat-and-dog life.  I never let you know—­and yet I see now we might have got along in any other relationship.  We were very friendly when we parted, and I’m not a bit jealous because he cares for another woman who I can see is much better suited to him.