Some may assert that to be divorced is a social stigma.

It used to be so perhaps, but society has grown very lenient nowadays.

Divorced women hold their own in the best and most brilliant circles, and what is strange is that they are very generally petted and pitied.
"Poor thing!" says society, putting up its eyeglass to scan admiringly the beautiful heroine of the latest aristocratic scandal--"she had such a brute of a husband! No wonder she liked that DEAR Lord So-and-So! Very wrong of her, of course, but she is so young! She was married at sixteen--quite a child!--could not have known her own mind!" The husband alluded to might have been the best and most chivalrous of men--anything but a "brute"-- yet he always figures as such somehow, and gets no sympathy.

And, by the way, it is rather a notable fact that all the beautiful, famous, or notorious women were "married at sixteen." How is this managed?
I can account for it in southern climates, where girls are full-grown at sixteen and old at thirty--but I cannot understand its being the case in England, where a "miss" of sixteen is a most objectionable and awkward ingenue, without any of the "charms wherewith to charm," and whose conversation is always vapid and silly to the point of absolute exhaustion on the part of those who are forced to listen to it.

These sixteen-year-old marriages are, however, the only explanation frisky English matrons can give for having such alarmingly prolific families of tall sons and daughters, and it is a happy and convenient excuse--one that provides a satisfactory reason for the excessive painting of their faces and dyeing of their hair.
Being young (as they so nobly assert), they wish to look even younger.
A la bonne heure! If men cannot see through the delicate fiction, they have only themselves to blame.