no compulsion, and they're the
ones, it seems to me, that have given the home its reputation for
sanctity. I never thought much about divorce, but I can see that much at
once. Of course, Allan takes the Church's attitude, which survives from
a time when a woman was bought and owned; when the God of Moses classed
her with the ox and the ass as a thing one must not covet."

"You really think if a woman has made a failure of her marriage she has
a right to break it."

"That seems sound as a general law, Nance--better for her to make a
hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because
of any superstition. But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may,
after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and
sealing-wax--believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has
recorded her marriage in a book--she will do better to stay. Doubtless
the conceit of it will console her--that the God who looks after the
planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so
uncertain a thing as a man."

"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 joi