"Woman!" Father Consett fulminated, "I've no patience wid ye! If the woman, as the Church directs, would have children by her husband and live decent, she would have no such feelings. It's unnatural living and unnatural practises that cause these complexes. Don't think I'm an ignoramus, priest if I am."
Mrs. Satterthwaite said:
"But Sylvia's had a child."
Father Consett swung round like a man that has been shot at.
"Whose?" he asked, and he pointed a dirty finger at his interlocutress. "It was that blackguard Drake's, wasn't it? I've long suspected that."
"It was probably Drake's," Mrs. Satterthwaite said.
"Then," the priest said, "in the face of the pains of the hereafter how could you let that decent lad in the hotness of his sin? . . ."
"Indeed," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "I shiver sometimes when I think of it. Don't believe that I had anything to do with trepanning him. But I couldn't hinder it. Sylvia's my daughter, and dog doesn't eat dog."
"There are times when it should," Father Consett said contemptuously.
"You don't seriously," Mrs. Satterthwaite said, "say that I, a mother, if an indifferent one, with my daughter appearing in trouble, as the kitchenmaids say, by a married man—that I should step in and stop a marriage that was a Godsend. . . ."