The host believed it had influenced legislation.
"For or against?" the bachelor inquired.
"Oh, against."
"But in other countries it's been coming in more and more. It seems to be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it's nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very embarrassing. It doesn't seem to bother the parties to the new relation themselves."
"It's very common in Germany, too," the husband on the right of the hostess said.
The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.
In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a diversion in her favor by saying that she had heard they had a very good law in Switzerland.
Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family by supplying her defect. "Oh, yes. It's very curious. We heard of it when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then they go home, and at the end of a certain time—weeks or months—the magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If they come, it is a good sign; if they don't come, or come and persist in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn't scandalous."
"It seems very sensible," the husband on the left of the hostess said, as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse their magnanimity, their condescension. They think that being there out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to "lend" them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives, when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.
"Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable evil?"