"Oh, I don't know that," the hardy bachelor said. "What about the one-tenth of the marriages which it didn't prevent? Would you have the parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid them all hope of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?"
"Yes," the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in), "wouldn't more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all the marriages as we have them now?"
"Aren't you both rather precipitate?" the stop-gap demanded. "I said, let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of relief. I haven't thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit."
"Ah?" the host inquired, with a provisional smile.
"Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things—the nature of men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be very seriously considered as a cause."
"Yes?"
"And, above all," and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye, "difference of sex."
The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and conditional approval went up.
The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. "Shall we leave them to their tobacco?" she said to the other women.
When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. "I don't think she'll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place without you."