"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." "Yes," she answered, remotely. "You don't suppose she'll think we live unhappily together?" XVII THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER "Well, what are you doing here?" the younger of the two sages asked, with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make sure of his identity, and then he said: "I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes." "How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the atmosphere of these motors?" the younger sage pursued. "And you don't imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?" "No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and touches the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece. As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to answer one. Why do you think they do it?" "Wear shoes like that?" the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as he added, "Because the rest do."