The Errors of Society

1901

The dark blots that divorce makes in society are too easily seen and too sad to write much about, so I will give only a few incidents of the absurd and humiliating positions in which people may be placed:

I once occupied a seat on the grand stand at the Newport Casino during a tennis match. After I had been in my seat a short time, a man I knew, once divorced, but remarried, came in with his new wife and occupied the two seats on my left, and a few moments later the woman from whom he had been divorced and who had also remarried came in with her new husband and sat directly on my right.

Whether the ticket agent arranged this for a joke I am not prepared to say, but all went well until I grew tired of the game and got up, leaving the four in a straight row, which made an interesting picture for a few moments. The four soon realized, however, what people were staring and smiling at, and, looking daggers at one another, immediately rose and disappeared in the crowd. The incident amused the lads and misses very much.

A lady I know very well in New York, who was giving a dinner party, told me she always dreaded the arranging of her guests at her tables, lest she put people together whom the "law had set apart," as she put it. "It would be perfectly dreadful to seat a gentleman beside a lady to whom he is paying alimony." — Smart Set.