fireplace, motherhood, and friends. I provided these, but failed to provide a satisfactory husband with them. Things solid, tri-dimensional things

we had in plenty. I even supported for her a yearly new edition of the most famous motor car in the world. But these things were not enough; nor were my affection, my variety of devotion, my quality of love (if we may dignify it by that name) enough to make her feel that she was living a life instead of leading an existence.

The essential fact is plain. I have failed to provide that subtle and supreme something, perhaps a mystic fusion of physical and spiritual elements necessary in an ideally reciprocal relation between man and woman, which my wife feels it is her right to have from life. And having failed here, what, I ask, have legal, clerical, ethical, scientific, or social precedents, conceptions, dogmas, theories, and traditions to do with this essentially individual and imperatively personal fact?

IV

Just as verbal and printed discussions of the divorce problem have been drably arid and hollow to me, so all those sages who have discussed my own theme so wisely seem thrust like foolish prophets forth; their words to scorn are scattered and their mouths are stopped with the dust of their own exegesis. Freud, Forel, Ribot, Krafft-Ebbing, Kisch, and even such sympathetic souls as Stanley Hall and Havelock Ellis have left me stiffly cold with my haunting perplexity. I have had ample time to read scientific, medical, and even mystic views upon love and marriage, and have even added such creampufferies as Elinor Glyn's complete and final philosophy of practical erotics. Yet the inner mystery of my wife's primitive and protean mind remains to

me as inscrutable as ever. She continues to hold the benefit of all my doubts and blundering surmises. She continues to hold my respect, and no little of my affection and admiration.

I have found no reason under heaven why this woman should remain my wife in name and to outward appearance when she is wedded in spirit to another. I have found no shadow of excuse to justify my asking her to live with me, save only the problematic welfare of our daughter. But this small girl has never heard a cross word, or seen a bitter look, or had reason to suspect the least note of discord between her father and mother, and there is no reason why she ever should except as she may absorb the opinions of others than ourselves. My wife and I have set our stage and played our appointed parts right well in the sight of our youngster, and played not without considerable reality of feeling - especially where she herself was concerned. Yet my wife is weary of play-acting, and wants to live. She believes that only by true living can she be to herself, or to her daughter, or to anyone, that which is worth being at all.

She claims that the quicker we remove our wigs and wash our faces, the happier we shall be with ourselves and with everyone with whom we dwell. She regards one phase of legal mummery in such a cause as noxious as any other, and prefers to suffer acutely if need be as a result of quick action from me, rather than to endure the almost chronically painful lengthiness of bringing a suit herself under the circumstances as we find them. To her the way seems clear, and the problem appears simple enough. To me it remains a conflict into this eleventh hour.

I feel, as the time draws near for me to enter a courtroom for the first time in my life, like a man drifting without a paddle in a lost canoe. I seem to be

headed toward a sudden plunge into water of unknown depths. Perhaps the fall will prove short, the current merciful, and I may be landed gratefully on a green and solid shore; but I cannot see ahead.

.

So easy it is for folks to say, as I have heard them say, or heard they have said: 'Serves her right; he ought to be rid of her quick. He should drop the matter and leave it up to her. . . . She ought to be spanked into her senses and settle down in her own home while she has the chance. . . . He's a damn fool to let that youngster steal his wife.

.. Abnormal creature, deserves to lose her. . . . They ought to get together, forget themselves, and live for the child. . . . It would be ridiculous if it were not so pitifully tragic. . . . This last utterance is the only one that seems to hold the least glimmer of understanding. I do, indeed, seem to be playing in a comedy fit for a Sunday supplement, and in a tragedy suitable to a highbrow novel; but opinion and comment have in no wise helped me to decide what is best for me to do.

V

I have always hated Adam's reply to God in the Garden of Eden. Eve very bravely and impudently ate her apple and disobeyed the Almighty. I respect her for it. Adam whimpered excuses about his wife's misconduct and example. That makes me sick. Men seem to have been justifying themselves in much the same way before the Lord ever since, and if not before God, then at least before judges and their fellow men.

Imagining myself in court on this case of mine, I feel like a miserable incarnation of that cowardly progenitor of our human race, and no amount of logic, or law, or custom, or man-made justice serves to make me feel one

whit better about it. If I arise in court and solemnly swear, hand on Bible, that my wife has criminally injured me, I shall feel like an Adamic cad. I shall deserve to be cast out into a land of thorns and sand, and to have the serpent proceed to bruise my heel.

If I drop my case at the courthouse door, as I sometimes feel I shall be impelled from within to do, I shall have added a cruel weight to the shoulders of my wife and friend, who already bears as much of a burden as any woman should be given. I shall postpone indefinitely the day when she may realize her heart's one supreme desire, which, be it a sublime reality or an absurd illusion, has held, holds, and shall hold my respect as the integrity of another person's mind. I shall seem to have backed out of a painfully difficult job simply to satisfy a whimsy of courtesy and personal preference on behalf of my own ego.

My lawyer writes me to keep my nerve, to play I am a surgeon about to perform a necessary and saving operation. Now I have already performed minor surgical operations upon my wife, with a scalpel, when those were necessary. I have also held her hand in mine through a major operation, and assisted in the birthing of her daughter. The legal operation that confronts me, however, seems sometimes quite beyond my small powers of endurance; and there seems utterly no answer to my inward perplexity save that resultant of struggling forces within me which must lead, right soon, to conclusive action. I do not know, to-day, what that action will be. And I do not ask anyone for suggestion or advice.

VI

I am not a moralist. I rather hate 'morals' tacked on, like label-tags, to the end of a story. I have set down an

attempt to crystallize a mood, or set of feelings, and I do not want to preach. Yet to any man who has spent a goodly portion of eight months thinking along a certain line, there ought to come a few tentative conclusions, if not in regard to the problem as a whole, then at least as to his own future conduct in the wake of its consequences.

Were I to proceed with this case, what should I do next?

Obviously my wife is taking a chance where the odds are tremendously against her. She steps from a world of friends and congenial acquaintances into a land organically inimical toward anyone who acts openly against its more sensitive mores. She enters a union whose success is doubted, if its consummation is not wholly disapproved by her family and friends. She gambles on the promise of integrity, solidarity, lasting affection, moral and financial support of a young man still a verdant freshman in the school of life, into whose hands she is willing to place her future as a wife, and as the mother of children, a profession she elected early in life to pursue. She knows she is playing with chance, though perhaps she has not tried to calculate the odds. That marriage is a job at adjustment, she has also learned, but she believes she can do better a second time than she has the first.

Personally, I wonder if she will be better able to adjust herself even to a man so different from myself. I do not think I flatter myself. I am sure I must bristle with irritating negatives like an Arizona cactus, and I probably remain as serenely unconscious of their sharp and stinging points. Yet, from the little I know of this young man, his surface is not smooth as an apple; and, as to my wife, she is not without antagonizing traits which call for adjustment in return.

VOL. 134-NO. 2

I somewhat fear that they both bank on the indubitable, but perhaps overestimated, power of physical attraction, of biological love, if you will, to bring the necessary compensations; and yet every intelligent person knows that sex as a physical mechanism is subject fundamentally to the law of diminishing returns, and perhaps even to Helmholtz's psycho-physics law of stimulus and reaction, both or either of which would at least modify the solidity of such a foundation for life.

Altogether I have reason to wonder whether their experiment will prove a success. What am I to do, I who gave my word of honor to love and to cherish this wife of mine until death do us part? Shall I so easily pragmatize the situation, let her lie on the bed she has made, and go my way relieved of further worry? I worry? I can hardly do that. I think without doubt she will leave me; it is probable that she will marry again.

There remains, it seems to me, but one thing for me to do: keep friendly. She will need financial support for a while whether she marries or not. I can help there through an allowance, or what you will, for the care of our daughter, for I shall certainly not take the girl from her mother, whatever judgment a bench may hand down. She will need moral support, the thought of a few friends in the world, more than once. This I can give as I may be able.

Does that sound sentimental? or like a merely verbal pose? Think of our daughter. Marriage may be dissolved, a home may be broken, man and wife may drift apart on their respective ways; but the child remains, concrete, steadfast, a lovely reality.

With respect to our daughter, my job seems to be, again: keep friendly. Without friendliness between my wife and me, the child will be hurt, deeply, lastingly. With concord and cheerful

To past generations prayer meant primarily the process of petition to God by which He was induced to do otherwise than He would have done if prayer had not been used. Fasting and sacrifice and prayer were the great magical triad by which men endeavored to secure favor from God. The Bible and Church History supply countless examples of the importance of this triad. They also illustrate the way in which fasting and sacrifice have gradually come to lose their importance.

But prayer meant also, or rather took with it, the sense of communion with God, not as the Supreme Governor who controls the universe, but as the Father who advises, comforts, strengthens, and forgives his children in answer to their cry of need, who enables them to bear the temptations of success and failure, and lightens their darkness when the clouds hang heavy overhead. The language in which this sense of communion has been expressed, has often changed, and will no doubt change again, but the experience which it expresses is permanent.

Moreover, because conversation is the best means of clarifying thought, prayer has been always the means whereby men have become conscious of their own aspirations, have seen glimpses of a better world, and have sought henceforward to make the life which they must live on the plain approach more closely to the vision which they have seen on the mount. The vision has always gone with them, and as the inevitable day of weakness has

drawn near, when they have known that Mt. Pisgah and not the Land of Promise was the farthest that they would reach, it has been to the vision that they have turned to find in it the true Reality. To errors of intellect and to the weakness of human nature they may have succumbed, for sinners as well as saints, ignorant as well as learned, foolish as well as wise have been among their number; but they have never wholly forgotten the vision, and those who have come after them have perceived that these were men who were pilgrims and sojourners here because they belonged to the city which hath foundations.'

Finally, confession or self-examination is a constant element in all the classic examples of prayer. It does not perhaps necessarily mean the recognition of error, though it often does so; but it is essentially a spiritual 'stocktaking,' revealing to him who prays what is the true nature of his life, strengthening the good, and condemning the evil in it. For this reason it perhaps plays a smaller part in public prayer than in private. Nevertheless there are certain causes for failure which are common to the race, and can be recognized and confessed in common prayer the pride of life, the lust of the eye, and the desire for revenge. These are the simplest and most powerful enemies of good, and they are met openly though not always by name, in all the great examples of prayer. It is impossible to pray "Thy Kingdom come' and, at the same moment, be