“Oh, my!” Miss Beale gave an almost hilarious laugh. “Well, I should think so. How could I ever lose interest in the Lord’s work? Why, I never even get discouraged.”
“It has occurred to me, sometimes—since I have been away and met all sorts of people—that if you really were Temperance you might have more chance of success.”
“If we were what?”
“Temperance in the actual meaning of the word. You’re not, you know; you’re teetotalists. That is the reason you antagonise so many thousands of men who might be glad to help you with their vote otherwise. The average gentleman—and there are thousands upon thousands of him—never gets drunk, and enjoys his wine at dinner and even his whiskey and water. He doesn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t have it, and there isn’t any. It adds to the pleasures of life. Those are the people that really represent Temperance, and naturally they have no sympathy with a movement that they consider narrow-minded and an unwarrantable intrusion.”
Miss Beale shook her head vigorously. “It is a sin to touch it!” she exclaimed, “and sooner or later they will all be drunkards, every one of them. The blessing of God is not on alcohol, and it should be banished from the face of the earth.”
Patience was in a perverse and almost ugly mood. “Tell me,” she said, “how do you reconcile your animosity to alcohol with the story of Christ’s turning the water into wine at the wedding feast?”
“It wasn’t wine,” said Miss Beale, triumphantly; “it was grape juice. Wine takes days to ferment, so the water couldn’t possibly have become wine all in a minute.”
Patience burst into laughter. “But, Miss Beale, it was a miracle anyhow, wasn’t it? If he could perform a miracle at all it would have been as easy to make wine out of water as grape juice.”
Miss Beale shook her head emphatically and set her lips. “I know that the Lord never would have offered wine to anybody; but grape juice is delightful, and he probably knew it, and they called it wine. That is all there is to it.”
“Oh,” exclaimed Patience, forgetting the Temperance question, as Miss Beale turned into a path and walked toward the side entrance of the First Presbyterian Church, “are we going here?”