In the summer, North Haven was mostly ruled by women—except on those occasional weekends or holidays when steamers brought the menfolk up from the mainland cities—and Gertrude Williams was the uncoronated queen of the island’s feminocracy. Not all women liked her, but none could deny her. She was too bold to be denied. She spoke out as freely as a man on things only men were supposed to speak about, like war and politics, and what was more, she got away with it. She was a suffragette, and had gotten herself arrested in the ’92 elections for storming a polling station with a dozen other emancipationists demanding ballots. But the boldest thing she had done, the thing that made some men a little afraid of her and most women admire her, was to divorce, very publicly divorce the very tall, very good-looking, and very prominent Dr. Gilcrest Williams, a specialist in diseases of the nose and throat, whose list of patients, it was said, could have substituted for the Boston Social Register and whose roster of female conquests was equally impressive—for its length. The case made the papers for a couple of weeks, scandal added to scandal, Gertrude having hired private detectives to track down as many of her husband’s paramours as could be found; seven altogether were hauled into divorce court to testify and make her case overwhelming, and the yellow press had a banner day when one of the women turned out to be a patient of the esteemed doctor.

So Gertrude Williams became a free woman, a martyr and heroine to others of her sex. But not to all. A few of her friends shunned her afterward because they thought she’d aired far too much dirty linen far too publicly. She hadn’t divorced the doctor, she had gone to war with him, destroyed him by destroying his reputation, its destruction precipitating the ruin of his practice. In the end, he fled to Chicago, where morals were less stringent and no one had heard of him. Gertrude had run him out of town on a rail, but her own reputation as dutiful and loving wife had suffered: Dr. William’s lawyer argued that Gertrude had denied his client his conjugal rights after the birth of their third child, giving her love to social causes (conditions in the slums, the plight of immigrants, woman’s suffrage) instead of to him. That’s what the lawyer said, but it cut no ice with the judge.