A Chicago Lawyer Sees Sam I 117

queer. Yager Cantwell, we realized, could spur some of these “reluctant missionaries” into action in dealing with social issues, and so I kept urging him to send me his revolutionary discoveries.

One day a bulky envelope arrived from his La Salle Street office in Chicago, enclosing a story so eloquent and compelling that we immediately handed it around at a staff meeting and decided to use it as the lead article in our next issue, which happened to be March 1953. We entitled it “She Wanted a Divorce” and we made the subhead “The Story of a Client Who Did Not Get Her Way.” It created great interest and became the first of a new series of similar pieces which focused on how individuals whose faith had become alive might change their office procedures andlor family life. Here is the story in a condensed form:

One evening a young married woman—Yager suggests calling her Dorothy to preserve complete anonymity—brought me a familiar story. Her love for her husband had turned to loathing and she had twice asked him for a divorce. As she rehearsed her grievances there appeared in clear outline the picture of a life which had gone hollow—the center was without motivation. Even caring for her children—she had two, eight and ten—had lost its meaning and she had come to the place where she was merely existing in a kind of desert. Hers was an arid life without love, faith, or hope.

When I could interrupt, I asked her a few questions: What she thought a divorce would solve. What problems it would raise. What effect it would have on the children’s personalities and their future.

She insisted that she had thought of all these angles and was putting the children’s welfare before all else. They would be happier, she maintained, if they were living with a mother whose home did not resemble “an armed camp.”

Then I asked her what she had tried to do to prevent a divorce, and if she had tried to find an answer to the sterility of her own life. Yes indeed, she replied, that was just where the desperation had come in. She had “tried everything, even prayer,” but nothing had worked, “except perhaps those prayers.” She had wanted to ask me about them. What did I think about prayer?

“Before I answer,” I found myself saying, “I’d like to ask you two more questions: Do you think there’s any possibility of your husband or you changing so that you can be happy?” “No, people