"I imagine Allan said 'no.'"
"He did. Would you have advised her differently?"
"Bless you, no. I'd advise her to obey her priest. The fact that she consulted him shows that she has no law of her own. St. Paul said this wise and deep thing: 'I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth anything unclean, to him it is unclean!'"
"Then it lay in her own view of it. If she had felt free to go, she would have done right to go."
"Naturally."
"Yet Allan talked to her about the sanctity of the home."
"I doubt if the sanctity of the home is maintained by keeping unwilling mates together, Nance. I can imagine nothing less sanctified than a home of that sort—peopled by a couple held together against the desire of either or both. The willing mates need no compulsion, and they're the ones, it seems to me, that have given the home its reputation for sanctity. I never thought much about divorce, but I can see that much at once. Of course, Allan takes the Church's attitude, which survives from a time when a woman was bought and owned; when the God of Moses classed her with the ox and the ass as a thing one must not covet."
"You really think if a woman has made a failure of her marriage she has a right to break it."
"That seems sound as a general law, Nance—better for her to make a hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because of any superstition. But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may, after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and sealing-wax—believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has recorded her marriage in a book—she will do better to stay. Doubtless the conceit of it will console her—that the God who looks after the planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so uncertain a thing as a man."
"Then you would advise—"