V
Once before, Judith had attempted to implant an abstract idea in Mrs. Trench’s mind. Now she was betrayed into a discussion of moral responsibility, with no intent other than that of bridging over a trying period of her none too comfortable relations with her mother-in-law. That Lavinia would carry away even a germ of an idea, she did not suspect. She had merely reiterated what Mrs. Henderson had said, twenty years ago. As yet she had not fully perceived, in that warped mind, one dominating characteristic: the ability to find justification for anything that seemed desirable. True, Eileen had said—but Eileen was not always fair in her old-time strictures on her mother.
Judith looked at the abject figure, the pallid face and the hard mouth ... and pity overmastered her. She wanted to say something comforting. The door was shut, the discussion ended. Lavinia sat there, pondering. It was all so different from the groundwork of her religious training. Probably Browning and Judith and Mrs. Henderson were wrong. To her literal mind, their idea could not accord with the stern dictum: “The wages of sin is death.” Still, their theory would serve to explain Eileen. In her pondering, she went the length of formulating the postulate: “Eileen sinned and became happy. Her sin was the source of her regeneration.”
There must be something to it. She, Vine Larimore, had been virtuous—and disaster had overtaken her. Lettie Fournier had sinned ... and for all the years of her subsequent life she had worn the name of Calvin Stone. That this distinction brought her rival scant happiness, was beside the point. The transgression of the moral law was the barrier which both Lettie and Eileen had passed to the kind of satisfaction that had been denied her. Judith had not told her of the days and nights of self-purging. She saw only externals, and these were all in favour of the Browning theory. After a long interval she said:
“Would you mind telling her—Eileen—that I want her to come to me? You know better how to get hold of her. She thinks I don’t love her—that I’m partial to Sylvia. I do love her ... and I want her at home with me, where I can study her. It will be bitter enough dose for me to take my lesson from her. But I am willing to do it, if she can show me the way to happiness.” She looked incredibly old and tired and hopeless. “And would you mind lending me your copy of Browning? I want to read ‘The Statue and the Bust’ through. Sylvia took mine with her when she moved to Detroit. I didn’t think I would ever look at it again.”
XXXIV Lavinia’s Credo
I
“Sister Judy,” Jack Denslow called, “there’s a bully fire down the avenue. Come and watch the motor engine go by. Good-bye, old horse, your day is done.”