“Oh, to be sure, to be sure!” he cried; “Mrs. Burgess has read your recent articles in the Economist, and she is quite enthusiastic over them. It will be all right.”
“I am sure it will,” said John Gregory. He was thinking of Anna’s face as she had passed him in the hall below, but he did not mention the fact that they had met to Everett.
CHAPTER XX
That which has caused the miserable failure of all the efforts of natural religion is that its founders have not had the courage to lay hold upon the hearts of men, consenting to no partition. They have not understood the imperious desire for immolation which lies in the depths of every soul, and souls have taken their revenge in not heeding those too lukewarm lovers.
—Life of St. Francis. Sabatier.
To be content to have while others have not, to be content to be right while others are bound and crushed with wrong, to be content to be saved apart from the common life, to seek heaven while our brothers are in hell, is deepest perdition and not salvation; it is the mark of Cain in a new form.—G. D. Herron.
In the few years which followed her early married life, the cords of convention, slender, and strong as threads of silk, were wound closer and closer about Anna Burgess outwardly. As she grew older, Keith’s mother grew more immovable in her social creed, and ruled her family more rigidly. Anna might read and study, but if she would please her mother-in-law, it must be in the mildest of manners, and on strictly suitable and ladylike lines; religious biography was recommended, while all literature which conveyed a touch of freedom in thought, or a suggestion of a change in social conditions, was viewed with horror.
Anna might also be charitable, but this too must be on strictly conventional lines. There were numerous benevolent organizations upheld by Fulham’s fashionable women; the name of Mrs. Keith Burgess might figure frequently on these,—to this there would be no opposition, but individual and sporadic work among the poor was uniformly discouraged. The family carriage was often sent into the slums of the city on errands of bestowal as from the wealthy to those “less favoured,” but when Anna would have liked the carriage to take her on social calls on equal terms, in respectable but unfashionable regions, she met with a cold disfavour and unyielding lack of compliance.
Malvina Loveland, who had been married to the Rev. Frank Nichols, not long after Anna’s marriage, had come again within Anna’s horizon. Through Keith’s personal influence, exerted at Mr. Nichols’s request, a call had been extended to him to the pastorate of a church in Fulham. This church was not very large and not particularly prominent; furthermore, it was not in the “right” part of Fulham geographically, which was as distinctly limited as the social circle.
The Nicholses, delighted to come to Fulham as a university town of some importance, and to a church far more promising of obvious success than the mission enterprise in which they had worked in Burlington, innocently rented a cosey modern house on a pleasant street which, had they but known it, distinctly stamped them as socially ineligible from the day of their arrival.