‘Nous avons change tout cela’, although there are yet certain crudities to be eliminated.  In these enlightened times, if in one week a lady is not entirely at home with husband number one, in the next week she may have travelled in comparative comfort some two-thirds across a continent, and be on the highroad to husband number two.  Why travel?  Why have to put up with all this useless expense and worry and waste of time?  Why not have one’s divorce sent, C.O.D., to one’s door, or establish a new branch of the Post-office Department?  American enterprise has surely lagged in this.

Seated in a plush-covered rocking-chair that rocked on a track of its own, and thus saved the yellow-and-red hotel carpet, the Honourable Dave Beckwith patiently explained the vexatious process demanded by his particular sovereign state before she should consent to cut the Gordian knot of marriage.  And his state—­the Honourable Dave remarked—­was in the very forefront of enlightenment in this respect:  practically all that she demanded was that ladies in Mrs. Spence’s predicament should become, pro tempore, her citizens.  Married misery did not exist in the Honourable Dave’s state, amongst her own bona fide citizens.  And, by a wise provision in the Constitution of our glorious American Union, no one state could tie the nuptial knot so tight that another state could not cut it at a blow.

Six months’ residence, and a whole year before the divorce could be granted!  Honora looked at the plush rocking-chair, the yellow-and-red carpet, the inevitable ice-water on the marble-topped table, and the picture of a lady the shape of a liqueur bottle playing tennis in the late eighties, and sighed.  For one who is sensitive to surroundings, that room was a torture chamber.

“But Mr. Beckwith,” she exclaimed, “I never could spend a year here!  Isn’t there a—­house I could get that is a—­a little—­a little better furnished?  And then there is a certain publicity about staying at a hotel.”

The Honourable Dave might have been justly called the friend of ladies in a temporary condition of loneliness.  His mission in life was not merely that of a liberator, but his natural goodness led him to perform a hundred acts of kindness to make as comfortable as possible the purgatory of the unfortunates under his charge.  He was a man of a remarkable appearance, and not to be lightly forgotten.  His hair, above all, fascinated Honora, and she found her eyes continually returning to it.  So incredibly short it was, and so incredibly stiff, that it reminded her of the needle points on the cylinder of an old-fashioned music-box; and she wondered, if it were properly inserted, what would be the resultant melody.