New York (State) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
The cowering Charity got from him the impression that home life had
always been flawless in this country until the last few years, when
divorce began to prosper, and that domestic life in countries where
there is little or no divorce had always been an unmitigated success.
If only divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium of our fathers
would return.
This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid impression
from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling as ever ran facts through
a sieve and threw away all the big chunks that would not go through the
fine mesh of his prejudices. He abhorred falsehood, cruelty, skepticism,
sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons were unconscious mixtures
of hand-picked truth and eloquent legends, ruthless denunciations of
misunderstood people and views, atheism toward the revelations of all
the sciences (particularly the science of biblical criticism, which he
hated worse than he hated Haeckel), and a narrowness that kept trying to
sharpen itself into a razor edge.
Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit crimes and
moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable old gentleman. It was this
phase that Charity knew, for she had not heard one of his sermons for a
year or more, though she saw him often in his parish work. She was the
more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day.
Charity had always assumed that the United States was the most virtuous,
enlightened, and humane of nations. According to Doctor Mosely, it was
shockingly corrupt, disgusting. The family as an institution was almost
completely gone; its only salvation would be an immediate return to a
divorceless condition. (Like that of Italy and Spain and France during
the Middle Ages?)
Hitherto Charity had not thought much about divorce, except to regret
that certain friends of hers had not hit it off better and had had to
undergo cruel notoriety after their private distresses. But divorce was
no longer an academic question to her. It had come home.
When she realized that her husband had been not only neglectful of her,
but devoted to a definite other woman, she felt at first that it would
be heinous to receive him back in her arms fresh from the arms of a vile
creature like Zada L'Etoile. Now she got from the pulpit the distinct
message that just this was her one important duty, and that any attempt
to break from such a triple yoke would be a monstrous iniquity which the
Church could not condone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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