She found her sister perfectly complacent.
Blanche was a fervent disciple of Jasper Thrale and machinery, and Thrale had anticipated Millie’s return and in some ways prepared for it. At odd moments he had preached the new gospel, the tenets of which Blanche had begun to formulate for herself.
“It’s no good going back to the old morality for a precedent,” had been the essential argument used by Thrale; “we have to face new conditions. If a man is only to have one wife now, the race will decline, probably perish. It is a woman’s duty to bear children.”
Eileen, Blanche and a few other young women had wondered that he made no application of the argument to his own case, but his opinion carried more weight by reason of his continence. Even Miss Jenkyn could not urge that his opinion was framed to defend his own mode of life, and, failing that casuistical support, she had to fall back on the second alternative of her kind, namely, to assert that this preacher of antagonistic opinions was either the devil in person or possessed by him—a line of defence which took longer to establish than the simple accusation of expediency.
So Millie, returning one wet October afternoon, found that no excuses were required of her. Blanche welcomed her and asked no questions, and Jasper Thrale and Eileen came to the little cottage in St Peter’s Street at sunset and treated the prodigal Millie with a new and altogether delightful friendliness. It was understood that she would return at once to her work in the Mill. But in the school-house opposite another reception was being prepared for her.
The more advanced of the Jenkynites were for taking immediate action. Prayer, worship, and the acknowledgment of personal sin fell into the background that evening, Millie appeared not as a brand to be saved from the burning, but as an abandoned and evil creature who must be thrust out of the community if any member of it was to save her soul alive. Every one of these furious religionists could stand up and declare that she was innocent of the commission of this particular sin of Millie’s, and every one was willing and anxious to cast the first stone.
The meeting simmered, and at last boiled over into St Peter’s Street. A band of more than a dozen rigidly virtuous and ecstatically Christian women beat at the door of the Goslings’ cottage. They had come to denounce sin and thrust the sinner out of the community with physical violence. Each of them in her own heart thought of herself as the bride of Christ.
The door was opened to them by Jasper Thrale.
“We have come to cast out the evil one!” cried Miss Jenkyn in a high emotional voice.