A man of the period was almost expected to have mistresses—well-appointed yachts could be very convenient for just such an intimate rendezvous—and a canny society woman might even get away with keeping a lover of her own, if she was especially careful. But no one—and I mean no one—expected the William K. Vanderbilts to get divorced. The plot of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence turns on the social impossibility of divorce for a certain class of women. But then again,