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. "I don't go as far as that," the stop-gap resumed, "but as an inveterate enemy of divorce--" An "Oh!" varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted. "I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I defy any one here to say that it is." As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company remained silent. But this did not save them.