XVI
TABLE TALK
They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as it, forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant shock, out of temper with the general feeling.
"I don't suppose," the host said, "that it's really so much commoner than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive. That's perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom heard of it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I didn't know a single divorced person."
"And of course," a bachelor guest ventured, "a person of that sort must be single."
At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the women not so much as the men.
"And you couldn't say that now?" the lady on the right of the host inquired.
"Why, I don't know," he returned, thoughtfully, after a little interval. "I don't just call one to mind."
"Then," the bachelor said, "that classes you. If you moved in our best society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers."