He glanced quickly at her, the hint of a frown drawing about his eyes.
"Mrs. Covil should have been more discreet. The authority of a priest in these matters is a thing of delicate adjustment—the law for one may not be the law for all. These are not matters to gossip of."
"So it seems. I was thinking of your opposite counsel to Mrs. Eversley."
"There—really, you know I read minds, at times— somehow I knew that would be the next thing you'd speak of."
"Yes?"
"The circumstances are entirely different—I may add that—that any intimation of inconsistency will be very unpleasing to me—very!"
"I can see that the circumstances are different—the Eversleys are not what you would call 'important factors' in the Church—and besides—that is a case of a wife leaving her husband."
"Nance—I'm afraid you're not pleasing me—if I catch your drift. Must I point out the difference—the spiritual difference? That misguided woman wanted to desert her husband merely because he had hurt her pride—her vanity—by certain alleged attentions to other women, concerning the measure of which I had no knowledge. That was a case where the cross must be borne for the true refining of that dross of vanity from her soul. Her husband is of her class, and her life with him will chasten her. While here—what have we here?"
He began to pace the floor as he was wont to do when he prepared a sermon.
"Here we have a flagrant example of what is nothing less than spiritual miscegenation—that's it!—why didn't I think of that phrase before—spiritual miscegenation. A rattle-brained boy, with the connivance of a common magistrate, effects a certain kind of alliance with a person inferior to him in every point of view—birth, breeding, station, culture, wealth—a person, moreover, who will doubtless be glad to relinquish her so-called rights for a sum of money. Can that, I ask you, be called a marriage? Can we suppose an all-wise God to have joined two natures so ill-adapted, so mutually exclusive, so repellent to each other after that first glamour is past. Really, such a supposition is not only puerile but irreverent. It is the conventional supposition, I grant, and theoretically, the unvarying supposition of the Church; but God has given us reasoning powers to use fearlessly —not to be kept superstitiously in the shackles of any tradition whatsoever. Why, the very Church itself from its founding is an example of the wisdom of violating tradition when it shall seem meet—it has always had to do this."