As she tore it open, she and Gannett were laughing over some
ineptitude of the local guide-book--they had been driven, of late, to
make the most of such incidental humors of travel. Even when she had
unfolded the document she took it for some unimportant business paper sent
abroad for her signature, and her eye travelled inattentively over the
curly _Whereases_ of the preamble until a word arrested her:--Divorce.
There it stood, an impassable barrier, between her husband's name and
hers.
She had been prepared for it, of course, as healthy people are said to be
prepared for death, in the sense of knowing it must come without in the
least expecting that it will. She had known from the first that Tillotson
meant to divorce her--but what did it matter? Nothing mattered, in those
first days of supreme deliverance, but the fact that she was free; and not
so much (she had begun to be aware) that freedom had released her from
Tillotson as that it had given her to Gannett. This discovery had not been
agreeable to her self-esteem. She had preferred to think that Tillotson
had himself embodied all her reasons for leaving him; and those he
represented had seemed cogent enough to stand in no need of reinforcement.
Yet she had not left him till she met Gannett. It was her love for Gannett
that had made life with Tillotson so poor and incomplete a business. If
she had never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling
of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted
it as a provisional compensation,--she had made it "do.
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