But that was just the kind of talk I got, everywhere, nearly every time I asked any one what a divorce was. Some laughed, and some sighed. Some looked real worried 'cause I'd asked it, and one got mad. (That was the dressmaker. I found out afterward that she'd _had_ a divorce already, so probably she thought I asked the question on purpose to plague her.) But nobody would answer me--really answer me sensibly, so I'd know what it meant; and 'most everybody said, "Run away, child," or "You shouldn't talk of such things," or, "Wait, my dear, till you're older"; and all that. Oh, how I hate such talk when I really want to know something! How do they expect us to get our education if they won't answer our questions? I don't know which made me angriest--I mean angrier. (I'm speaking of two things, so I must, I suppose. I hate grammar!) To have them talk like that--not answer me, you know--or have them do as Mr. Jones, the storekeeper, did, and the men there with him. It was one day when I was in there buying some white thread for Nurse Sarah, and it was a little while after I had asked the doctor if a divorce was a disease. Somebody had said something that made me think you could buy divorces, and I suddenly determined to ask Mr. Jones if he had them for sale. (Of course all this sounds very silly to me now, for I know that a divorce is very simple and very common. It's just like a marriage certificate, only it _un_marries you instead of marrying you; but I didn't know it then. And if I'm going to tell this story I've got to tell it just as it happened, of course.) Well, I asked Mr. Jones if you could buy divorces, and if he had them for sale; and you ought to have heard those men laugh. There were six of them sitting around the stove behind me. "Oh, yes, my little maid" (above all things I abhor to be called a little maid!) one of them cried. "You can buy them if you've got money enough; but I don't reckon our friend Jones here has got them for sale." Then they all laughed again, and winked at each other. (That's another disgusting thing--_winks_ when you ask a perfectly civil question! But what can you do? Stand it, that's all. There's such a lot of things we poor women have to stand!) Then they quieted down and looked very sober--the kind of sober you know is faced with laughs in the back--and began to tell me what a divorce really was. I can't remember them all, but I can some of them. Of course I understand now that these men were trying to be smart, and were talking for each other, not for me. And I knew it then--a little. We know a lot more things sometimes than folks think we do. Well, as near as I can remember it was like this: "A divorce is a knife that cuts a knot that hadn't ought to ever been tied," said one. "A divorce is a jump in the dark," said another. "No, it ain't. It's a jump from the frying-pan into the fire," piped up Mr. Jones.