She has a way of mislaying her Husband.

It brings no satisfaction with it, speaking out one’s mind to Fate.  We want to see him before us, the thing of flesh and blood that has brought all this upon her.  Was it that early husband—or rather the gentleman she thought was her husband.  As a matter of fact, he was a husband.  Only he did not happen to be hers.  That naturally confused her.  “Then who is my husband?” she seems to have said to herself; “I had a husband: I remember it distinctly.”

“Difficult to know them apart from one another,” says the lady with the past, “the way they dress them all alike nowadays.  I suppose it does not really matter.  They are much the same as one another when you get them home.  Doesn’t do to be too fussy.”

She is a careless woman.  She is always mislaying that early husband.  And she has an unfortunate knack of finding him at the wrong moment.  Perhaps that is the Problem: What is a lady to do with a husband for whom she has no further use?  If she gives him away he is sure to come back, like the clever dog that is sent in a hamper to the other end of the kingdom, and three days afterwards is found gasping on the doorstep.  If she leaves him in the middle of South Africa, with most of the heavy baggage and all the debts, she may reckon it a certainty that on her return from her next honeymoon he will be the first to greet her.

Her surprise at meeting him again is a little unreasonable.  She seems to be under the impression that because she has forgotten him, he is for all practical purposes dead.

“Why I forgot all about him,” she seems to be arguing to herself, “seven years ago at least.  According to the laws of Nature there ought to be nothing left of him but just his bones.”

She is indignant at finding he is still alive, and lets him know it—tells him he is a beast for turning up at his sister’s party, and pleads to him for one last favour: that he will go away where neither she nor anybody else of any importance will ever see him or hear of him again.  That’s all she asks of him.  If he make a point of it she will—though her costume is ill adapted to the exercise—go down upon her knees to ask it of him.

He brutally retorts that he doesn’t know where to “get.”  The lady travels round a good deal and seems to be in most places.  She accepts week-end invitations to the houses of his nearest relatives.  She has married his first cousin, and is now getting up a bazaar with the help of his present wife.  How he is to avoid her he does not quite see.

Perhaps, by the by, that is really the Problem: where is the early husband to disappear to?  Even if every time he saw her coming he were to duck under the table, somebody would be sure to notice it and make remarks.  Ought he to take himself out one dark night, tie a brick round his neck, and throw himself into a pond?