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'Even if the words mean nothing in particular, they are very precious.

'But what has the "violet-tinctured essence" to do with common seaweed? Perhaps it has n't any thing to do with it, but if we should find out that it has, there would be an added pleasure which comes with intelligence.

'But perhaps we had better go back to the vivid phrase "tossings of pain." Perhaps you have had a touch of erysipelas which has caused the tossing of pain, and perhaps it has been relieved by the application of iodine. You can visualize the bottle. Now all that you need is a very slight knowledge of pharmacy to make the poet's meaning sun-clear. When you learn that one of the chief sources of iodine is common seaweed, you are on a perfect intellectual equality with the poet. The rather sloppy seaweed on the beach is glorified by its relation to the violet-colored essence in the bottle. It is a process which the psychoanalysts call sublimation.

"You ask, "Why does n't the poet explain all this?" The answer is, "He does, in a footnote, and that is the reason why I have been able to explain it

to you.

999

That was an unlucky moment for me. The reference to the footnote was my undoing. I glanced at Tomlinson. There was a strange look on his face. It was not scorn or indignation, but a look of outraged innocence. Tomlinson seemed as one who was wounded in the home of his friends.

'Martin Farquhar Tupper!' he exclaimed. 'Proverbial Philosophy, footnote to page 14.' His tone conveyed deep respect for an honored name, and sorrowful surprise at the liberty I had taken with it.

As we walked home, I broke the silence which had become painful. "Tomlinson,' I said, 'I did n't know that you read Tupper.'

'I don't,' he said, 'in public, but what a man does in private is something between himself and his conscience. One has to keep up with the procession in literature as in every thing else; but it's hard on the nerves. The mind is kept on the stretch. It's the price we have to pay for progress. But when I go home from the Literary Society and sit down by the fire to enjoy myself, I always take up the Proverbial Philosophy. It's a link with a happy past. Makes me feel at home with my own mind. He tells me what I knew beforehand, and it's very comforting to be told it in such a serious way. It makes me feel safe and sane. In these last few years when I've felt that it was my duty to keep up with the literary advance movement, I've craved something I can understand without too much effort. Now I can usually understand what Tupper is driving at. And when he makes an allusion that is a little difficult all one has to do is to look at the bottom of the page.

'For instance take the poem on memory, which begins:

'Where art thou, storehouse of the mind, garner of facts and fancies,

In what strange firmament are laid the beams of thine airy chambers?

Or art thou that small cavern, the centre of the rolling brain

Where still one sandy morsel testifieth man's original.

'I should n't have guessed what that small cavern was, or what was the sandy morsel in the rolling brain, if it had n't been for the footnote, which explained that "the small cavern is the pineal gland, a small oval about the size of a pea, in the centre of the brain, and generally found to contain, even in children, some particles of gravel. Galen and afterwards Descartes imagined it to be the seat of the soul."

"That shows what Tupper had in

mind. After that, it's all clear sailing, though I don't know what the new physiologists would say about that piece of gravel in the centre of the brain. Galen, I suppose, is looked upon as a back number in medicine.

'When I'm reading the text of Tupper, I don't tax my memory with the words. It's the general impression that every thing is all right that I retain. But when it comes to a footnote

I take notice. I'm sure to get some useful information. That's where you slipped up. If you had just recited the poetry, you might have got away with it; but when you quoted the footnote I spotted you. I can repeat every footnote in the Proverbial Philosophy.'

'I'm sorry, Tomlinson, that I made such a bad break.'

'I'm sorry too,' he replied. 'I'm afraid it will break up the club.'

SHALL I DIVORCE MY WIFE?1

BY BURNHAM HALL

DURING eight months of exile from my home I have pondered this question. Two months ago I filed suit for divorce in a near-by court; yet I still ask myself whether I should put it through. The case will not be contested. It is clear, definite, and simple, and duly substantiated. My wife herself wants it to go through, quickly. She wants to marry the man she has loved, still loves, and believes she always will love. Having given me just cause for divorce, she is willing to take her medicine and abide by its inward and outward results.

I, however, would infinitely rather she would get a decree against me instead. We consulted with three lawyer friends and tried to work up a case against me for our local courts, obviating the necessity for travel into another state, with its consequent expense of time and money. I lent every reserve of my personal history, and even con1 This paper is, of course, an absolutely true record. - THE EDITOR.

I

siderable of my imagination to help build up a case of mental cruelty against me in support of my wife's claim that she found it impossible to live with me. Two of our friends thought we had a case, but when we placed it in the hands of the third, who alone of the three was licensed to practice in our state, he gave it up, saying that he could not face a judge with such evidence as we had built together.

He thought, however, that he might construct a case of alienated affections if I would compromise one or another of my women friends, of whom my wife might claim jealousy!

Then a somewhat celebrated lawyer offered to get a divorce in favor of my wife, if I could provide myself with a professional co-respondent, furnish the necessary cash for detective witnesses, and meet a fee of fifteen hundred dollars. A less prominent, but doubtless wiser man of law, advised me against such procedure. He said that the

state of the public mind, and therefore that of the bench, was at present dangerously against such collusion and that it was very apt to fail.

Weeks slipped by and my wife grew impatient of delay. She thought I was stalling in the hope that she would settle down again to dull existence with me instead of realizing her dream of abundant life with one whom she loved. She had acted honestly, openly, and either courageously or merely imprudently when she ran away to him on their first adventure. Courageously, I say, if she went with a full understanding of the consequences, and was willing to face them; imprudently and foolishly if she dived off on impulse from a springboard of ignorance.

I choose to grant her full credit for knowing what she was about. She seems to have faced the world and marched straight ahead. Now she was through with me as a husband, wanted her freedom, and wanted it quickly.

I had indeed hoped she might change her mind and, with it, her heart. I had wondered if this romance were not what William James once called an emotional jag, precipitated by a long and tedious strain and forgivable and forgettable as one might forgive and forget a spree. I did not know how to help her change that ever mysterious mind of hers. Perhaps some men know how. Sometimes they seem to do such things in novels and movies. I confess to failure, and I also confess to a myopic misunderstanding of what can, and does, really happen in a woman's soul when she hits the trail of her dream, not in reverie but in fact.

I had welcomed her back to roof, food, clothing, and the material artefacts of life, not as her husband but as a friend in time of need. Having been dropped as a husband, I chose to remain a friend, and was accepted as such.

But the problem of her freedom remained, and after much more communion with legal minds (marvelous contraptions of historic sophistry!) I found myself, as it were, in the very clutches of the law.

II

I know very little about divorce in the abstract. I have read, since it became a personal problem to me, a few articles in the Atlantic, in the World's Work, and in scattered periodicals here and there. None of these articles mean very much to me. Not one of them throws the faintest light on my own individual case. I sit, in enforced exile, awaiting the day appointed for me to come into court and accuse openly, publicly, a friend of mine, my one-time wife, of a statutory crime. I sit here in the very spirit and letter of those lines from Wilde's Ballad of Reading Gaol:

I know not whether laws be right
Or whether laws be wrong,
All that we know who sit in jail
Is that the wall is strong,
And that each day is like a year,

A year whose days are long.

My little reading has led me through discussions as to whether marriage was made by God or by man; whether Church, or State, or both, or neither, should control marrying and unmarrying. I have read citations from judges, quotations from Scripture, extracts from anthropology, precedents from the law, and a host of opinions, lay and clerical, legal and medical; and I seem not one whit wiser, and certainly not the least trifle comforted by all these acres of printed word.

What concerns me is a definite, bitterly earnest conflict of feelings within my soul, or heart, or mind, or whatever it is that becomes the battlefield of one's emotions. Shall I end these days of uncertainty, of anxious waiting, of inward

perturbation both for myself and for my erstwhile wife, by throttling my sense of courtesy and even decency, go to court, and pillory a woman whom I respect and admire; or shall I drop the case and go my way, leaving it to her to find her freedom as best she can, alone?

Nor does retrospective analysis of the factors involved in this case lend a helpful hand toward the settling of my question. It has become a struggle of almost pure feeling, in which facts, dates, figures, picture-memories, opinions, and abstractions serve as a mere hazy background, or as a dimly interested audience of wearied faces. The outcome seems to lie in the final resultant of two tugging, striving, major forces, pulled on tangents by minor issues of chance circumstance and time. If it were only possible for me to be angry, or to feel deeply injured or dramatically jealous- how easy my how easy my answer would be! As it is, my coming approach to the law has all the semblance of cold-blooded, maliciously calculated murder. The end may justify the means, but I am not as yet a convert of Machiavelli, nor an emulator of Benvenuto Cellini, both of which worthies I read with considerable delight. Yet I cannot even work myself into a rage against the man who has stolen my wife, to use a phrase rooted in the time when wives were private property -like swords, or pipes, or horses.

He is no villain. He is a most admirable young man in many ways, many years younger than I, and several years younger than the woman he loves and wants to marry. Physically he triumphs over me at every point. His shock of curly brown hair would turn the Apollo Belvedere jaundiced with envy; he has the shoulders of a young gorilla, while as a typical caveman he would enthrall the feminine element in any movie audience. I, on the contrary, am built along lines of the pro

verbial bean-pole, regret a sprinkling of gray over my ears, shall probably be nearly bald within six years and, as a movie-actor, would make an admirable bookkeeper or professor in a boardingschool. I do not jot down this contrast in levity, but in quite serious earnest. Physique doth count in unmarrying as well as in first marrying.

Only inscrutable Providence knows why my wife elected me the successful candidate from among her bevy of would-be husbands before we were married. The fact remains that she did, and that she afterwards regretted her choice. On the contrary, I know full well why I selected such a charmingly buoyant amazon for a possible wife, and I have not regretted it even through our latest storm, and perhaps our last. The hand of the great potter did not shake when he fashioned her frame, and he breathed a remarkably vital spirit into her clay.

There must be primal, fundamental reasons for a romantic revolution in a woman's heart, and sheer quality of physical fitness for reciprocal matehood doubtless plays an all important part. I mean more than a mere functional capacity for paternity or maternity. Our vibrantly wholesome daughter, reincarnating so much of her mother's magnetism and versatility of physique belies such a physiological level. Nor am I persuaded that Mr. Wilfrid Lay's thesis, in his interesting but enormously padded Plea for Monogamy, has solved the major problems of the matrimonial universe. There seems to be, at least on the part of my own wife, some conscious or unconscious physical standard or ideal to which I have not measured up; and this probably accounts, in part at least, for her change of mind and spirit toward me in our married life.

This factor cannot be affected practically by any academic, literary, legal, clerical, or scientific discussion of our

problem. It remains a constant, or at least a very slightly variable factor. The odds here are against me. I accept a defeat which was written in my ancestry before I was born into this droll, Darwinian world.

III

The variables in my perplexity consist of that multitude of wavering, stressing, straining, and conflicting thoughts, feelings, words, and acts, which, together with desire, sympathy, and sometimes with love, go into the building of married life. Only an impossibly complete record of these, in the hands of an omniscient psychoanalyst, would prove of much practical value in an attempted solution of such a problem as I have faced during the last eight months and more.

I have had ample leisure, lately, to go over these elements very thoroughly and even microscopically. I have tapped long-buried memories in retrospection, reread years of diary and stacks of old letters. My wife and I have chatted over our historic petty differences and major conflicts of opinion in a friendly attempt to sift their proper worth, and perhaps to understand each other better. These items, fit for amicable discussion, are welcome in law courts, and would make delightful material for gossip among our acquaintances; but to one's own soul the details are like so much wind-blown chaff, and may become as irritating as they are useless.

Stripped to the skin, exposed in primal nakedness and unashamed, our case seems to be that threadbare story of a self-satisfied husband, content with his wife, believing he loved her, and feeling quite sure that she was as happily content with him as he was with her. It is the same old story of yet another woman who has tried to adjust herself,

in married life, to less than she had hoped and dreamed of in that supposedly blessed state, and then suddenly decided to snatch from life by sheer force that which it had failed to give her with an open hand. Who shall say that she is wrong? The law court, yes; the clergy, yes; her neighbors, acquaintances, and even some of her friends, perhaps; but if within her own heart she believes she is right, what boots it judge, Church, or people? Where, in literature, or in tradition, or in our own convictions is there a solidly satisfactory answer to such a query?

I ask myself these questions in what is perhaps a futile attempt to be intellectually honest with myself and with her. I doubt if anyone is ever completely honest with himself in such a situation; but one may keep on trying.

My wife seems to feel something, to understand something in life that I do not. She seems to want something of which I have only a cloudy and somewhat poetic conception. Love, to her, seems to be something vitally different from what it has been to me. She left me, not because she hated me, or even because she greatly disliked me; but because she did not love me and because she did love somebody else.

That somebody has no money. He has no home. He has no job and does not want one. He is a romantically independent fellow, intent on building his own independent career outside of our vast system of corporation slavery. He offers her nothing save himself and his ambition and his own peculiar brand of love, with which she felt imperatively impelled to mate and there found happiness. For him she was willing to leave home, fireside, husband, child, and friends. For him she is willing and anxious to do this again, after her temporary return during a time of material stress.

Yet she loves and wants a home, a

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