Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/229

 The honeymoon, and even some further interval, had passed over with mutual and unexceptionable happiness, when, alas! the old habit began once more to creep over its victim. The alarmed and aggrieved wife, after a sad struggle between love for her husband and abhorrence of his vile habit, together with all the altered prospects of her whole life, through this health-injuring, time-wasting, and in every way anti-aesthetic practice, was persuaded, under due approval of her legal advisers, and as her last available resource, to bring her action of divorce.

The learned judge commented on the unusual clearness of the case. The wife's sacred vows were to the man himself, not to the man plus the tobacco. It was a case of divided affection, where agreement had been for undivided affection; while the victimized wife had been designedly, and by legal fraud, kept in ignorance of conducing circumstances prior to the matrimonial agreement. Had the wife been duly apprised beforehand of the bad tendency in question, her legal remedy was utterly gone, she having knowingly accepted all risks. Or had the vicious habit arisen only after marriage, she was in equal deprivation of remedy—nay, even more in this latter case, for the usual commanding influence of a good wife would seem in such case to have been at fault. Clearly there had been a legally constructive fraudulent concealment of facts that were most material to the intended marriage, and the court must therefore pronounce for a divorce.

Second Case.—The other case, as the judge, in effect, said at the time, was not one whit less clear.