Page:The Galaxy, Volume 5.djvu/412

398 "But I never spoke less lightly, I was never more in earnest in my life," said Lord Petres, in his thin, little, deliberate voice. "The discovery of statistical averages has, you know, Kate, established the practice of insurance in every department of life; and the present unhappy event is a sequence—don't be angry with me!—settled simply by decimal fractions. These calamities fall upon us personally, of course, but in averages. So many people out of every hundred must commit certain actions, and poor Mrs. Lawrence has eloped well, we will say has eloped as 8.7 in a thousand. Domestic catastrophes, in the gross, are as much matter of fixed law as sound or heat; as uniform of recurrence as the undirected letters dropped annually into the post office. Then, I say, why not insure against them? If there is a definite arithmetic of household, as of every other kind of shipwreck, why should not a man spare himself, and still more his friends, by guarding against it beforehand?"

"Perhaps because human hearts are not calculating machines," said Katharine. "Perhaps because love, and honesty, and trust are not, like ships and houses, things that you can buy with the money from an insurance office in place of those that are gone!"

"All this is merely matter of detail," said Lord Petres, with unruffled placidity. "The idea of matrimonial insurance, like every other social innovation, will require time before it can be brought into form or obtain acceptance from prejudiced minds. You are prejudiced to the last degree (I don't know how I could wish to see you changed), Kate. Like other enthusiastic people, with minds poisoned by transcendentalism, you would hold it nobler for a man to fight, face to face, with fortune, than render fortune null and void by paying a certain yearly sum into an insurance office. And still—"

"And still you will persist in speaking of the nearest, most sacred feelings of a man's heart, as if they were things that could be appraised by an auctioneer! Ah! Lord Petres, if you could establish a kind of moral Lloyd's ! an office that would insure against vain regrets, vain remorse the whole world would flock to it, I suppose!" cried poor Katharine, with a bitter sigh; then stopped short.

"And this is precisely what my theory, brought into form at some future day, would do," said Lord Petres. "How can we look forward, Kate? How can we say that in the twentieth century the loss of a man's wife will not have its precise equivalent—whether moral or financial is matter again of merest detail; but an equivalent that shall be regarded by society as his highest duty to accept, and which shall, at least, save his friends or relatives from the kind of guerrilla campaign into which you and I find ourselves forced now?"