Mallory acknowledged the greeting, and asked offhandedly: "By the way, how's she running?"
The conductor answered even more offhandedly: "About two hours late—and losin'."
Mallory was transfixed with a new fear: "Good Lord, my transport sails at sunrise."
"Oh, we ought to make 'Frisco by midnight, anyway."
"Midnight, and sail at daylight!"
"Unless we lose a little more time."
Mallory realized that every new day managed to create its own anxieties. With the regularity of a milkman, each morning left a fresh crisis on his doorstep.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE COMPLETE DIVORCER
The other passengers were growing nervous with their own troubles. The next stop was Reno, and in spite of all the wit that is heaped upon the town, it is a solemn place to those who must go there in purgatorial penance for matrimonial error.
Some honest souls regard such divorce-emporiums as dens of evil, where the wicked make a mockery of the sacrament and assail the foundations of society, by undermining the home. Other equally honest souls, believing that marriage is a human institution whose mishaps and mistakes should be rectified as far as possible, regard the divorce courts as cities of refuge for ill-treated or ill-mated women and men whose lives may be saved from utter ruination by the intervention of high-minded judges.