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“No, I think you’re a little nervous, that’s all.”

“Oh! Do you think I’ll get my divorce?”

“Certainly, without question.”

“Can I wait and go back with you?”

“I shall not return for several days. Perhaps you couldn’t bear to wait in this little town; it’s not much like the city.”

“Oh, dear! But I can’t go about alone. I hate these men, they stare at me so! I wish I was a man. It’s awful to be a woman, don’t you think so? Please don’t laugh.”

The young lawyer was far from laughing, but this was her only way of defending herself. These pert, bird-like ways formed her shield against ridicule and misprision.

He said, slowly, “Yes, it’s an awful thing to be a woman, but then it’s an awful responsibility to be a man.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we are responsible, as the dominant sex, for every tragic, incomplete woman’s life.”

“Don’t you blame Mrs. Shellberg?” she said, forcing him to a concrete example with savage swiftness.

“No. She had a poor father and a poor husband, and she must earn her own living some way.”

“She could cook, or nurse, or something like that.”

“It isn’t easy to find opportunity to cook or nurse. If it were as easy to earn a living in a pure way as it is in a vicious way, all men would be rich and virtuous. But what had you planned to do after your divorce?”

“Oh, I’m going to travel for two years. Then I’ll try to settle down.”

“What you need is a good husband, and a little cottage where you’d have to cook your own food–and tend the baby.”

“I wouldn’t cook for any man living,” she broke in, to express her bitterness that he could so coldly dispose of her future. “Oh, this terrible train! Can’t it go faster? If I’d realized what a trip this was, I wouldn’t have started.”

“This is the route you all go,” he replied, with grim humor, and his words pictured a ceaseless stream of divorcees.

She resented his classing her with the rest, but she simply said: “You despise me, don’t you? But what can we do? You can’t expect us to live with men we hate, can you? That would be worse than Mrs. Shellberg.”

“No, I don’t expect that of you. I’d issue a divorce coupon with every marriage certificate, and done with it,” he said, in desperate disgust. “Then this whole cursed business would be done away with. It isn’t a question of our laxity of divorce laws,” he said, after a pause, “it’s a question of the senseless severity of the laws in other States. That’s what throws this demoralizing business into our hands here.”

“It pays, don’t it? I know I’ve paid for everything I’ve had.”

“Yes, that’s the demoralizing thing. It draws a gang of conscienceless attorneys here, and it draws us who belong here off into dirty work, and it brings us into contact with men and women–I’m sick of the whole business.”

She had hardly followed him in his generalizations. She brought him back to the personal.

“You’re sick of me, I know you are!” She leaned her head on the window-pane. Her eyes closed. “Oh, I wish my heart would stop beating!” she said, in a tense, profoundly significant tone.

Allen, sitting so close behind them, was forced to overhear, so piercingly sweet was her voice. He trembled for fear some one else might hear her. It seemed like profanation that any one but God should listen to this outcry of a quivering, writhing soul.

She faced her companion again. “You’re the only man I know, now, that I respect, and you despise me.”

“No, I don’t; I pity you.”

“That’s worse. I want you to help me. Oh, if you could go with me, or if I could be with you!” Her gloved hands strained together in the agony of her desire.

His calm lips did not waver. He did not smile, even about the eyes. He knew her cry sprang from her need of a brother, not from the passion of a woman.