"But I would love him," Edith broke in almost fiercely. "That is just the point. One must refuse to cease to love him."
"But if he ceased to love her?"
A flush came into Edith's clear cheek, and her eyes shone. Half unconsciously to herself, she was fighting with the doubts which would now and then rise in her own mind of her husband's affection.
"Then," she said, in a low voice, "one must still be worthy of his love; one must do one's duty. Besides," she added, looking up with a gleam of hope, "when one has made a solemn vow, as a wife vows to love her husband until death part them, I firmly believe that strength to keep that vow will not be withheld."
Helen was silent a moment. She by no means agreed to the position Edith took. She had no belief in those promises in virtue of which the sacraments of the church took on a peculiar sanctity; she did not at all trust to any special help bestowed by higher powers. She did not, however, care to argue upon these points, and she said more lightly,—
"You task womanhood pretty heavily."
"A little woman who is a protegee of mine," Edith returned, in the same manner, "said rather quaintly the other day, that women were made so there should be somebody to be patient with men. She's having trouble with her lover, I suspect, and takes it hardly."
"But," Helen persisted more gravely, "it seems to me that you set before the unloved wife a task to which humanity is absolutely unequal."
"You remember St. Theresa and her two sous," Edith replied, her eyes shining with deep inner feeling; "how she said, 'St. Theresa and two sous are nothing, but St. Theresa and two sous and God are everything.' I can't argue, but for myself, I could not live if I should give up my ideal of duty."
As often it had happened before, Helen found herself so deeply moved by the fervor and the genuineness of Edith's faith, that she felt it impossible to go on with an argument which could convince only at the expense of weakening this rare trust. She brought the conversation back to its starting point.