come floods of invective and a
knock-down blow; and a molehill of a pinch has, under favourable
cultivation, been developed into a mountain of ill-treatment, on the
top of which a victorious wife has in the end, triumphantly planted
the banner of freedom.

[Illustration]

Hence the Divorce Court, after some years of suspicion, has gradually
come to be looked upon as one of the sacred institutions of
the country. And, speaking generally, those who make use of its
facilities, however much certain of the more strait-laced may frown,
are considered by society at large to have done a thing which is
surprisingly right and often enviable. The result at any rate is that
the number of the divorced increases year by year, and that a lady
whose failings have been established against her by a judicial decree,
may be quite sure of a hand of ardent sympathisers of both sexes,
amongst whom she can hold her head as high as her inclination prompts
her without exciting a larger number of spiteful comments than are
allotted to her immaculate and undecreed sisters. She may not have
been able to abide the question of the Counsel who cross-examined
her, but she is certainly free, even in a wider sense than before.
She may not, perhaps, stand on so lofty a social pinnacle as the
merely-separated lady whose husband still lives, and to whose male
friends the fact that she in practically husbandless, and at the same
time disabled from marriage, gives a delightful sense both of zest and
security. On the other hand, the separated lady must be to a certain
extent circumspect, lest she should place a weapon for further
punishment in the hands of her husband. But to the Divorcee all things
apparently, are permitted.

When she left the Court in which, to use her own words, "all her
budding hopes had been crushed by the triumph of injustice," the
beautiful Divorcee (for in order to be truly typical the Divorcee is
necessarily beautiful) might have proceeded immediately to plant them
afresh in the old soil. The various gentlemen who had sustained their
reputation as men of honour by tampering on her behalf and on their
own, with the strict letter of the truth, naturally felt that the
boldness of their denials entitled them to her lasting regard, and
showed themselves ready to aid her with their counsel. But, though she
never ceased to protest her innocence of all that had been laid to her
charge and proved against her, she was sufficiently sensible