Dick was the most charming fellow in the world, when you were not married to him. As a companion for life he was intolerable. He was far handsomer than a Greek god, but when you find your Greek god full of mundane ungodliness you cannot help regretting that so much charm should be wasted on merely outward appearance.
Yet, in spite of her thorough understanding of his character, Katherine could not help going back sentimentally to the time she first met and loved the man from whom she was now separated. He had attracted her with a magnetism no other man had ever inspired. She felt him looking at the back of her head before she had ever seen his face. It was at the opera, and later, when Mrs. Wesley introduced him, she knew instinctively she had met her fate.
His wooing was prompt and picturesque. But possession with him was ennui, and in the most childish fashion he ceased to prize the thing he obtained, and treated it with as much indifference as he had sought it with zeal.
Katherine, finding marriage an irremediable failure, had at length resorted to that haven for the incompatibles—the divorce court.
From a crude Western town, where they had cyclones for breakfast, she had only recently emerged, chastened in spirit and with a very formal red-sealed document in her keeping.
It was what she had waited so patiently for, yet now that it was in her possession she felt like going into mourning. It seemed indecent to act as though nothing had happened. She kept Dick’s old letters and cried over them, and wore a picture of him—taken during their happy engagement—in a heart-shaped locket inside her bodice.
Quite unusual with young and handsome divorcées, there was no other man in the case. She had not divorced Dick to marry some one else, but because of their incompatibility, which absolutely prevented their living together in harmony.
But no sooner was she settled in her old home than she began receiving proposals. Her old beaux came flocking around her, in more or less damaged condition, and there seemed a general belief that she had divorced Dick only to try it again with a new candidate for Dick’s shoes.
Her women friends were as bad. They would not permit her to pass into retirement, but insisted upon her accepting invitations. “Now you are free,” they told her, “you must make up for that miserable period of your married life by being as gay as possible.”
They turned a deaf ear to remonstrances.