Clare would call Dick “Richard.” Given her type, it was almost inevitable. Lewis wondered why it had taken him so unaware and why it need so irritate him. And it was also inevitable—but for this he had been totally unprepared—that she would overtly exonerate the slandered Petra and in the very act make it look worse for the child. For she was a person who could have her cake and eat it too, every time. It was a trick act, peculiar to the type.... But Lewis liked his own critical self less and less in exact ratio as he found himself liking Petra’s stepmother less and less. He wished he had never had to see her by daylight.
“Subconscious mind nothing!” Dick scoffed. “Clare, you’re always making excuses for everybody, but most of all for Petra. Couldn’t she see you waiting out here all afternoon from every window in the house? Wouldn’t that circumvent her subconscious forgettery mechanisms?”
“Oh yes, if she were in the house, my dear Richard. But she may have gone for a walk. Now, though, she’ll be back, dressing for this party of ours. I should have!”
“Well, I only wish I had known you were just waiting around here for nothing!” Dick was thoroughly upset. “I’ve been spoiling for exercise all afternoon. Cynthia insisted it was too hot to play, Harry stuck at his bank, and Lewis couldn’t be torn from Marlboro Street one minute ahead of time. But I’m sleeping at the Allens’ to-night, after Petra’s dance. How about a game tomorrow morning?”
“But my dear boy, to-morrow is Sunday,” Clare reminded him. Then, to Lewis, she explained, almost with a blush, “Don’t be shocked, Doctor Pryne. I never impose my religious idiosyncrasies on others, not even on my family. One doesn’t! And I don’t even carry my peculiarity to the point of going to church—do I, Richard? Oh, yes, I do really, only not”—she laughed—“the Meadowbrook Congregational Church! Green Doors is my church.
“I know an orchard, old and rare,
I will not tell you where,
With green doors opening to the sun,
And the sky children gather there—
“I can slip away, with a volume of essays or poetry, stretch out anywhere in the grass and sun on one of those slopes up there, and feel God nearer than He would ever come to me in the four walls of any church on earth, even the most beautiful cathedral. My husband says that that’s pagan. Perhaps it is. I am pagan, I think. But words for one’s religion don’t matter, do they! I know what I know, and I feel what I feel, and it is—beautiful.”