She looked at him for some moments, and his patience, not very unnaturally, began to give way. He wore blue spectacles, a circumstance which reduced every one to the same hue as regarded complexion, which was at the same time a drawback and a safeguard. Impelled to speak by his evident impatience, Margaret asked him with a trembling voice, "If a man drinks, can a wife leave him?"
"By mutual consent. If he illtreats her she can perhaps do so—by arrangement. Madam," he said, softening a little—a very little—at the soft pleading tones of her voice, "all you say to me is confidential—state your own, and not an abstract case. Does your husband drink?"
"Yes," said poor Margaret.
"Does he illtreat you when he is drunk?"
"No," said the poor child, trembling—"he—he frightens me."
"Ah! you see the law recognizes cruelty, and another thing, as a cause for legal separation, or even a divorce, but the fact of a man's being a drunkard is not taken into account."
"Not taken into account?" said Margaret, repeating his words in strongest surprise.
"No. So little does this fact—a very terrible fact—tell against a man in the eyes of the law, that, though you are too young to have children, supposing you had children, and that you left the father, the law gives the children to him and not to you—they remain with him, they do not go with you."
"God help me!" she murmured, fervently, her heart standing still in the great shock of this announcement. And if she had left him, as she had once thought of doing, her baby might have been kept from her.
"Then you cannot help me!"