The host laughed. "I prefer not to take the floor. I'm sure we all want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea."
"Oh yes, indeed," the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not knowing what might be coming.
"Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is the mother of divorce?"
"Whichever you like."
"The last proposition is self-evident," the stop-gap said, supplying himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the table. "And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else there's nothing in heredity."
"Oh, come!" one of the husbands said.
"Very well!" the stop-gap submitted. "I yield the word to you." But as the other went no further, he continued. "The case is so clear that it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we have simply been suppressing the symptoms; and your Swiss method—"
"Oh, it isn't mine," the man said who had stated it.
"—Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made difficult."
"Some," the daring bachelor said, "think it ought to be made impossible." The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically, but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at all.