“Yes,” answered Charlotte, her voice growing cold and hard again. “People can be divorced for incompatibility of temper.”
“Charlotte!” The young girl started a little, and leaned forward, laying her hand upon her sister’s knee.
“Oh, yes! I mean it. I’m sorry to horrify you so, my dear, and I suppose papa would say that divorce was not a proper subject for conversation. Perhaps he’s right—but he’s not here to tell us so.”
“But, Charlie—” Katharine stopped short, unable to say the first word of the many that rushed to her lips.
“I know,” said Charlotte, paying no attention. “I know exactly what you’re going to say. You are going to argue the question, and tell me in the first place that I’m bad, and then that I’m mad, and then that I’m a mother,—and all sorts of things. I’ve thought of them all, my dear; and they’re very terrible, of course. But I’m quite willing to be them all at once, if I can only get my freedom again. I don’t expect much sympathy, and I don’t want any good advice—and I haven’t seen a lawyer yet. But I must talk—I must say it out—I must hear it! Kitty—I’m desperate! I never knew what it meant before.”
She rose suddenly from her seat, walked twice up and down the room, and then stood still before Katharine, and looked down into her face.
“Of course you can’t understand,” she said, as she had said before. “How should you?” She seemed to be waiting for an answer.
“I think I could, if you would tell me more about yourself,” Katharine replied. “I’m trying to understand. I’d help you if I knew how.”
“That’s impossible.” Mrs. Slayback seated herself again. “But it’s this. You must have wondered why I married him, didn’t you?”
“Well—not exactly. But it seemed to me—there were other men, if you meant to marry a man you didn’t love.”