The news from Paris was equally good. Edna had settled there after a joyous summer going from country house to country house in Britain, and from château to château in France. She had seen one château which she wished me to buy, and she begged me to come over and inspect it. She did not explicitly say so, but I read between the lines that she was greatly strengthening her social position by giving out that she purposed buying a big place. You may imagine how much enthusiasm for her such an announcement would create among noble down-at-the-heel families eager to exchange unsalable old rook-roosts for American dollars. I could hear her talking--how subtly she would put forth the suggestion, how diplomatically she would discuss each worthless stone heap in turn--and how she would rake in the invitations so difficult to get unless one happens to know how, and so easy when one does know. But with my arrival in New York I had a reverse. A cable came from Edna saying that she was sailing at once and wished to see me. I could not imagine what she wanted, and I did not waste much time in making guesses. One evening, when Armitage and I were dining together in the Federal Club--Blankenship had sailed for home--the idea flashed into my mind that perhaps Edna wanted a divorce. Immediately I felt that I had hit upon the precise reason for her coming. You will have no difficulty in imagining what was the next idea in my train of thought. If she divorced me I should be free to marry whom I pleased! It was stupid of me, but in all my revolvings of my hopeless love for Mary Kirkwood never once had I thought of divorcing my wife. I cannot account for this lapse, except as an instance of the universal human failing for overlooking the obvious. There was no religious scruple in my early training to make me shy of divorce. On the contrary, my parents, like most old-fashioned Americans of faiths other than Episcopal and Catholic--and Episcopalians and Catholics were few in the old American stock, except in New York and Baltimore and South Carolina--most old-fashioned Americans believed that living together in wedlock without love was sin, that divorce was no mere necessary evil, but a religious rite as sacred as marriage itself. A house, they held, is either a House of Hate or a House of Love, and no one should remain in a House of Hate, and no child should be brought up there.