torious in the particular social circle
where she moves--while he, poor wretch, is perforce tongue-tied, and
dare not consider himself wronged. There is no more pitiable object in
the world than such a man--secretly derided and jeered at by his
fellows, he occupies an almost worse position than that of a galley
slave, while in his own esteem he has sunk so low that he dare not,
even in secret, try to fathom the depth to which he has fallen. Some
may assert that to be divorced is a social stigma. It used to be so
perhaps, but society has grown very lenient nowadays. Divorced women
hold their own in the best and most brilliant circles, and what is
strange is that they are very generally petted and pitied.

"Poor thing!" says society, putting up its eyeglass to scan admiringly
the beautiful heroine of the latest aristocratic scandal--"she had such
a brute of a husband! No wonder she liked that DEAR Lord So-and-So!
Very wrong of her, of course, but she is so young! She was married at
sixteen--quite a child!--could not have known her own mind!"

The husband alluded to might have been the best and most chivalrous of
men--anything but a "brute"--yet he always figures as such somehow, and
gets no sympathy. And, by the way, it is rather a notable fact that all
the beautiful, famous, or notorious women were "married at sixteen."
How is this managed? I can account for it in southern climates, where
girls are full-grown at sixteen and old at thirty--but I cannot
understand its being the case in England, where a "miss" of sixteen is
a most objectionable and awkward ingenue, without any of the "charms
wherewith to charm," and whose conversation is always vapid and silly
to the point of absolute exhaustion on the part of those who are forced
to listen to it. These sixteen-year-old marriages are, however, the
only explanation frisky English matrons can give for having such
alarmingly prolific families of tall sons and daughters, and it is a
happy and convenient excuse--one that provides a satisfactory reason
for the excessive painting of their faces and dyeing of their hair.
Being young (as they so nobly assert), they wish to look even younger.
A la bonne heure! If men cannot see through the delicate fiction, they
have only themselves to blame. As for me, I believe in the old, old,
apparently foolish legend of Adam and Eve's sin and the curse which
followed it--the curse on man is inevitably carried out to this day.
God said:

"BECA