In those three days I saw about a dozen cases tried and disposed of. And what sort of people do you think they were who came there with and against their wills? The gay, the frivolous, the debonnair? Oh, dear me, no; not in the least. I saw not one gallant gentleman, not one lovely lady. On the contrary, they were the dusty, the dowdy, the humdrum, and, this is the odd thing, the middle-aged! They were the kind of women who make their own hats, make them very badly, and talk about their servants at afternoon tea; and of men who go up to town at 8-45 of a morning, and come home by the 6-15. Some of them, of course, had occasionally lost the 6-15, and that was where the trouble began.
It is grossly unfair to the aristocracy to say that it is they who keep the divorce court going. “Aristocratic divorce cases,” as the Radical papers absurdly call them, make not one per cent. of the whole. It is the dull, stodgy middle-class among whom immorality is rampant! And it is just because they are dull, stodgy, and middle-class.
The pleasures, the emotional outlets of art, the distractions which intelligence can always find in the world, are closed against them. Meanwhile, beneath their commonplace domesticity the passion for Romance, though smothered, smoulders on. One fine day, on the most ridiculously inadequate provocation, it bursts into a flame and then—“decree nisi with costs.”
Poor devils, poor, poor devils, they haven’t brains enough to outwit a Slaters’ detective or even a prying housemaid.
Brains, ah! yes. Brains are your stand-by in marriage as in most other of life’s perplexities, Alexa. It is brains that keep you out of matrimonial troubles, and even, when in a slack moment, you do get into difficulties, it is brains that will pull you out of them.
Looking at those of my personal acquaintances who have come bad croppers over their marriages, I find that in every case there has been want of wit on one side or the other, often on both. Brains! That is why I have considerable confidence in your future, my daughter.
One word more. Romance, in-loveness, cannot survive six weeks of the appalling intimacy of marriage. That is past praying for. What shall follow its departure then? Mere emptiness, a tramp across a sandy desert or a treacherous bog? That depends. The thing that should follow is friendship, friendship of a peculiar, a unique, sort; friendship touched by tenderness, mixed with memories, coloured by emotion.
But again remember this—it takes as much brains to build up and to maintain a friendship of that kind as it does to ... well ... more than it does to do anything else in the world so well worth doing. Fools may make satisfactory lovers, only the wise can be lasting friends.
You return on Friday, isn’t it? I shall be at Paddington to meet you. See to it that He is not there—just for this once!