"Come back to the church!" she echoed. "You don't leave it. If marriage takes you out of the church, then the sooner such a church is left the better! Do you realize what you are doing, Philip? Do you remember that you insult the good name of your mother by the view you take of marriage? I am sick of all this infamous condemnation of what to me is holy! If the church cannot rise to a noble and pure conception of it, the sooner the church is done away with, the better for mankind!"
"But you wrong the church," he interrupted eagerly. "The church makes marriage a sacrament; it recognizes its purity; it"—
"Then what are you doing," she burst in, "with your exceptions to the theory of the church? It is you who degrade it—Pardon me, cousin," she added in a calmer voice, coming to him and laying her fingers lightly on his shoulder. "I am speaking out of my heart. I have the shame of knowing that I once failed to realize how high and how noble a thing marriage is. I am older than you, and I have suffered as I hope you may never have to suffer; the end of it all is that I have learned that there is nothing else on earth so blessed as the real love of husband and wife. Of course," she concluded, as he would have interrupted, "I talk as a woman, and I cannot decide what you are to do. Only I would like you to believe that I would help you if I could, and that what I say of marriage is the thing which seems to me the truest thing on earth."
Then without waiting for reply, she went away and left him to his thoughts.
IX
HIS PURE HEART'S TRUTH
Two Gentlemen of Verona, iv. 2.
"Who is Mr. Rangely?" Ashe inquired one morning at breakfast.
Mrs. Herman looked at her husband as if she expected him to reply, although the question had been addressed to her.
"Fred Rangely," Grant Herman answered, "is a writer. He writes for the magazines and is a newspaper man. He's written one or two novels, and the first one was pretty successful. He's written plays too."
Helen smiled.