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.

But, on the other hand, it is a fact borne out by all the figures that a child does in the vast majority of cases bind together the husband and wife, as no other influence or moral restraint; and that among all the women who come to the Divorce Court the overwhelming majority is made up of childless wives.

These women are not naturally vicious. They have not gone wrong because their principles are perverted. They are not, as a rule, intellectual anarchists who have come to the conclusion that the conventional moral code is wrong and that the laws of marriage are neither divine nor just. On the contrary, they are conscience-stricken, they are terrified by their own act. Many of them are brokenhearted and filled with shame. It is pitiful to hear their letters read in court, letters to their husbands pleading for forgiveness, asking for “another chance,” or trying, feebly, to throw the blame on the man, and to whitewash themselves as much as possible. To judge from their letters it would seem that they were under some evil spell, and that they were conscious of being dragged away from their duty as though Fate had clutched them by the hair, so that although they struggled they could not resist, and were borne helplessly along upon a swift tide of passion carrying them to destruction. “I could not help myself” is the burden of their cry, as though they had no free-will, and no strength of will. Occasionally they give tragic pictures of their idle lives, so lacking in interest, so barren, so boring. There is another phrase which crops up again and again: “Oh, I was bored—bored—bored!” It was the man that saved her from boredom who now shares the woman’s guilt, and stands in the witness box in this court of honor. He came to her just at that moment in the Eighth Year when she was bored to death. He was kind, sympathetic, understanding. He brought a little color back into her cheeks, a little laughter into her eyes, a little sunshine into her life. He seemed such a boy, so youthful and high-spirited, such a contrast to her husband, always busy, and always worrying over his business. He told good stories, took her to the theatre, arranged little supper-parties, made a new adventure of life. He would sit chatting with her over the fire, when there were flickering shadows on the walls. He chased away the ghosts, gave her new dreams, brought new hopes.... And then suddenly he begins to tempt her; and she shrinks back from him, and is afraid. He knows she is afraid, but he tries to laugh away her fears. She pleads with him to go away, but there is insincerity in her voice, her words are faltering. She knows that if he were to go away she would be left more lonely than before, in intolerable loneliness till the ghosts would rush back at her. So he stays, and tempts her a little more. Gradually, little by little, he becomes her great temptation, overwhelming all other things in life dwarfing all other things, even her faith and honor. How can she resist? By what power within her can she resist?

She does not resist. And yet by yielding she does not gain that happiness to which she stretched out her hands. She does not satisfy the great hunger in her heart or quench her burning thirst. She has not even killed the ghosts which haunt her, or healed the pin pricks of her conscience. Her conscience is one great bleeding wound. For this woman of the middle-classes is a creature of her caste Nor in most cases can she break the rules of her caste without frightful hurt to herself. She was brought up in a “nice” home. Her mother was a woman of old-fashioned virtues. Her father was a man who would have seen her dead rather than shamed. She received a High School education, and read Tennyson and Longfellow with moral notes by her class-mistress. She used to go to church, and sometimes goes there still, though without any fervor or strength of faith. She has heard the old words, “The wages of sin is death,” and she shrinks a little when she thinks of them. Above all she has been brought up on romantic fiction, and that is always on the side of the angels. The modern problem novel has arrested her intellect, has startled her, challenged her, given her “notions”; but in her heart of hearts she still believes in the old-fashioned code of morals, in the sweet old virtues. This sin of hers is a great terror to her. She is not brazen-faced. She does not justify it by any advanced philosophy. She is just a poor, weak, silly woman, who has gone to the edge of a precipice, grown giddy, and fallen off the cliff. She throws up her hands with a great cry. The way of escape through the Divorce Court door is not a way to happiness. It is a way to remorse, to secret agonies, to a life-long wretchedness. Her second husband, if he “plays the game” according to the rules of the world, is not to be envied. Between him and this woman there are old ghosts. This way of escape is into a haunted house.