understand Bessie--there's no good of my explaining her. You'd have
thought divorce a brand-new invention of the devil, instead of a
comparatively old institution. And if you don't mind my saying so,
my boy, you took this fence a bit on the run, the way you do
everything.

"The fact is, divorce is going out of fashion. Maybe it's because
the Pendleton-Grenfell element have always set their patrician faces
against it; maybe its been a bit overdone. Most people who have
tried it have discovered that the fire is no better than the frying-
pan--both hot as soon as they warm up. Of course, old boy, there's
nothing personal in this. Sit tight, and stick to the simple life--
that's your game as I see it. No news--I've never known things to
be so quiet. Jerry won over two thousand night before last--he made
it no trumps in his own hand four times running.

"Yours,

"CECIL."

Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he
crushed it. There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act,
and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message of
good-will. Whatever its wording, such it was. A dark red flush had
mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.

"Well?" he said.

She was fighting for her presence of mind. Flashes of his temper she had
known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing--his anger. Not