While she was giving the attic its annual overhauling, she had come upon the yellow files of the Bromfield Sentinel, the edges broken like pie crust. She had read again the spirited account of the meeting at which Mrs. David Trench was elected secretary of the most intellectual club in Springdale. Who was there in her girlhood home for whom this triumph would provide a thrill of gratification or a sting of envy? Ellen knew all about it. Isabel had long since removed to California. Her mother was dead. The girls of her social circle? The Browning craze had not invaded Bromfield, and there was not one among her old friends for whose opinion she cared a straw.
IV
She came back to herself with a start. “The Statue and the Bust,” she muttered. “We did that one, the winter before Isabel was born. I had to drop out—and Mrs. Henderson sent me her notes. It was a shockingly immoral thing, for the wife of a college president—a Presbyterian minister, at that. I never had quite the same opinion of her, after I read those notes. She said the lady who sat at the window and watched for the duke to ride by—would have been less wicked if she had actually run away with him. She said it was just as bad to want to commit sin as to actually commit it—”
“Yes, if they restrained themselves only because of fear of the consequences. There is no virtue in that kind of repression.”
To Lavinia Trench everything was personal. She turned the thought over in her mind ... “afraid of the consequences” ... “no virtue in that kind of repression.” Her whole life had been one of repression. Mrs. Henderson had stressed the lines:
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”
“That isn’t my idea of sin. At least it wasn’t, until....” She trailed off into incoherence, thumbing the pages nervously. “Judith, do you think a woman—a married woman—could go on caring for some other man—” She struggled with the obstruction in her throat. “I mean the bride of Riccardi, in the poem. I can’t see how caring, and just thinking how much she would like to be with him—was—wrong. She didn’t commit any act of sin—didn’t break the seventh commandment.”
“In the eyes of the world she was a virtuous woman. In her own heart she was an unsatisfied wanton. She added hypocrisy to the sin of desire, and on that hypocrisy she wrecked her only chance for happiness.”