"Why, of course, it is simply a contract. Everyone except clergymen regards it so nowadays. If Clarence had died, I could marry again; why shouldn't I be just as free, when he has been untrue to me, to regard our marriage at an end--and----" Mrs. Wilson put up her hand. "I am familiar with the argument. For adultery, perhaps, yes; but for everything else, no. And the Roman Church forbids it absolutely." She reflected a moment, then, as one who has worked out vindication for an ancient principle by the light of modern ideas, she added, impressively, "It may well be, that from the standpoint of the welfare of the home--the protection of human society against rampant selfish individualism--the oldest church of all was wise, and is wise, in insisting on adherence to the letter of the words of Christ as best adapted to the safety of civilization. And that, too," she continued, significantly, "even though the souls affected sin in secret, because they cannot override the law. I do not say," she added, noticing the surprise in her daughter's face, "that this winking of the church is defensible; but I submit that the consequences can be no worse than those resulting from the flood-tide of easy divorce, the fruit of unbridled caprice." "And what do you say to the attitude of the Church of England, of which our Episcopal Church is an offshoot. An English woman in Newport told me the other day that a wife cannot obtain a divorce from her husband unless infidelity be coupled with cruel and abusive treatment, though the contrary is true in case of a man. A husband can have his affairs, provided he does not make them public or beat his wife, but she must toe the mark. And in England the law of the church is the law of the land." Mrs. Wilson pondered a moment. "Our Episcopal Church sanctions no such distinction. But, after all, woman is not quite the same as man. Her standard is different; she still expects to be held to a subtler sense of beauty and duty in matters which involve the perpetuation of the race. The English rule seems old-fashioned to us, for we insist on equal purity for the husband and the wife as essential to domestic unity. Yet the framers of that law were wise in their day; wise, surely, if the doctrine of loose marital bonds is to imperil the permanence of the institution we call the family." "But I fail to see the advantage to human society of any family the two chief members of which are at daggers drawn, and mutually unhappy."