"Nobody challenged it."
"But if it does not save all it is imperfect. And surely John the Beloved knew his Master's heart, and he says 'Jesus Christ is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world.' How can any one dare to narrow that zone of mercy?"
"You argue like a woman, Dora."
"I am not arguing. I am only quoting what the greatest of men have said."
Then Robert lifted the Sunday Magazine and answered all her further efforts at conversation in polite monosyllables, and finding the position she had been relegated to both embarrassing and humiliating, she finally went to her room upstairs, and shut herself in with God. Her eyes were full of unshed tears, as she turned the key, for she felt that something in her life had lost its foothold. Was it her faith? Oh, no! She trusted God implicitly. She could not think any ill of Him, she had loved Him from her cradle. Was it her love? Oh, how reluctant she was, to even ask this question. But there was a great change in Robert, or was it that she now saw the real Robert Campbell, while the man who had wooed and won her had been but a man playing a lover's rôle?
For even during the few days they had been at home, it was evident that both he and his family were resolved on her surrendering her faith, and her individuality. She was to be made over by the Campbells in their own image and likeness. Robert had loved and married Theodora Newton; was she to change her character with her name? She had made no such promise, and, without the slightest egotism, she could see that such a denial of herself would compel from her mental and spiritual nature a downward, backward movement, so deep and wide she dared not contemplate it.
Her duty to her husband was plain as the Bible, and she promised herself to fulfil it to the last tittle, but while doing this, she must find the courage to be true to herself, as well as to others. And as nothing can be done in the heart by halves, it would be no fitful or uncertain struggle. The whole soul, the whole heart, the whole mind, the whole life, would be demanded. She was troubled at the prospect before her. Would she find strength and wisdom for it? Or would it prove to be another of the lost fights of Virtue?
"No, no!" she cried. "I shall not fight alone. God and Theodora are a multitude."
She had certainly that doleful afternoon gone back in piteous memory to her teaching and writing, and her own peaceful, loving home, and thought that if trouble was necessary for her higher development it could have been better borne in either environment. But she acknowledged also that
"Where our Captain bids us go,
'Tis not ours to murmur 'No.'
He that gives us sword and shield,
Chooses too the battlefield."