One way of escape is through the door of the Divorce Court. Sir Francis Jeune, when he was President of the Divorce Court, saw before him many of these escaping women, and he noted down the fact about the Eighth Year; and sitting there with an impassive face, but watchful eyes, he saw the characters in all these little tragedies and came to know the type and the plot from constant reiteration. Sometimes the plot varied, but only in accidentals, never in essentials. As the story was rehearsed before him, it always began in the same way, with a happy year or two of marriage. Then it was followed by the first stress and strain. Then there came the drifting apart, the little naggings, the quarrels, the misunderstandings, until the wife--it was generally the wife--became bored, lonely, emotional, hysterical, and an easy victim for the first fellow with a roving eye, a smooth tongue, and an easy conscience. The procession still goes on, the long procession of women who try to escape through the Divorce Court door. Every year they come, and the same story is told and retold with sickening repetition. In most cases they are childless wives. That is proved, beyond dispute, by all statistics of divorce. Sometimes they have one or two children, but those cases are much more rare. But even when there are children to complicate the issues and to be the heirs of these tragedies, the causes behind the tragedies are the same. The woman has had idle hands in her lap before the Eighth Year of marriage has been reached. In the early years her little home was enough to satisfy her mind and heart, and her interests were enough to keep her busy. The coming of the first child, and of the second, if there is a second, was for a time sufficient to crowd her day with little duties and to prevent any restlessness or any deadly boredom. All went well while she had but one maidservant, and while her husband’s feet were still on the lower rungs of the ladder. But the trouble began with the arrival of the extra servant and with the promotion of her husband. It began when gradually she handed over domestic duties to paid people, when she was seldom in the kitchen and more in the drawing-room, when the children were put under the charge of a nurse, and when the responsibilities of motherhood had become a sinecure. The fact must be faced that a child is not always a cure for the emptiness of a woman’s heart, nor an absolute pledge of fidelity between husband and wife. These women who seek a way of escape from their little homes are not always brought to that position by the unfulfilled instincts of motherhood. For many of them have no instincts of motherhood. They feel no great natural desire to have a child. They even shrink from the idea of motherhood, and plead their lack of courage, their ill-health, their weakness. With their husbands they are partners in a childless scheme, or if they have a child--they quickly thrust it into the nursery to leave themselves free.