Lavinia’s face flamed scarlet and she tugged at the collar of her elaborate silk waist. But speech was not wanting, for more than the fraction of a second.
“Well, I want to know what other wild-goose schemes you have for her.”
Judith shifted impatiently in her chair. “You have a grievance. I wish you would be specific. Eileen is surely not causing you any anxiety. She is growing into a beautiful young woman and she has the respect of the entire community.”
“Respect! Yes!” The words crackled. “The whole town respects her. You can’t see what that means. You have no religion and no moral sense of your own. For a girl to do what she did—and then walk right back here into a position that she never would have had, if she’d been a good girl, is a positive slur on religion.”
Judith gasped. She wanted to laugh—to take her mother-in-law by the shoulders and shake her. But Lavinia had not done speaking:
“It says in the Bible—”
“It says a good many things in the Bible. You take from it what appeals to you—and shape your religion to suit your own needs.”
Lavinia was not slow to catch an idea that could be stopped by the mesh of her mental net. Her son’s philosophy usually passed through without leaving a fragment. But this idea was large enough to be arrested. Two facts conspired to give it substance and form. For his Sunday sermon, the minister had combined a passage from Isaiah with another from the Epistle to the Hebrews. And—wholly unrelated, but subtly significant—Lavinia had just finished an elaborate gelatine dessert for dinner.
“You mean that we pick from the Bible what we want and fit it together.”
“Practically that. We can’t get anything out of a book unless we have in our own minds the vessels to carry away the meaning. A cult or a religion is nothing more than the solidifying of a group of ideas. The Christian religion—”