considered a royal road to happiness, and a woman ought to get her
impetus in either case from her own inner consciousness. I should call
divorcing by advice quite as silly as marrying by it."

"But it comes at last to her own law in her own heart?"

"When she has awakened to it--when she honestly feels it. God's law for
woman is the same as for man--and he has but two laws for both that are
universal and unchanging: The first is, they are bound at all times to
desire happiness; the second is, that they can be happy only by being
wise--which is what we sometimes mean when we say 'good,' but of course
no one knows what wisdom is for all, nor what goodness is for all,
because we are not mechanical dolls of the same pattern. That's why I
reverence God--the scheme is so ingenious--so productive of variety in
goodness and wisdom. Probably an evil marriage is as hard to be quit of
as any vice. People persist long after the sanctity has gone--because
they lack moral courage. Hoover was quite that way with cigarettes. If
some one could only have made Jim believe that God had joined him to
cigarettes, and that he mustn't quit them or he'd shatter the
foundations of our domestic integrity--he'd have died in cheerful
smoke--very soon after a time when he says I saved his life. All he
wanted was some excuse to go on smoking. Most people are
so--slothful-souled. But remember, don't advise your friend in town. Her
asking advice is a sign that she shouldn't have it. She is not of the
coterie that Paul describes--if you don't mind Paul once more--'Happy is
he that condemneth not himself in that which he alloweth.'"

There had come to the woman a vast influx of dignity--a joyous increase
in the volume of that new feeling that called to her husband. She would
have gone back, but one of the reasons would have been because she