“'As the water to the vessel, woman shapes herself to man;' an old heathen said that three thousand years ago, and others have repeated him; that is what you mean.”
“I don't like that way of putting it,” answered my mother. “I mean that as you say of man, so in every true woman is contained all women. But to know her completely you must love her with all love.”
Sometimes the talk would be of religion, for my mother's faith was no dead thing that must be kept ever sheltered from the air, lest it crumble.
One evening “Who are we that we should live?” cried Hal. “The spider is less cruel; the very pig less greedy, gluttonous and foul; the tiger less tigerish; our cousin ape less monkeyish. What are we but savages, clothed and ashamed, nine-tenths of us?”
“But Sodom and Gomorrah,” reminded him my mother, “would have been spared for the sake of ten just men.”
“Much more sensible to have hurried the ten men out, leaving the remainder to be buried with all their abominations under their own ashes,” growled Hal.
“And we shall be purified,” continued my mother, “the evil in us washed away.”
“Why have made us ill merely to mend us? If the Almighty were so anxious for our company, why not have made us decent in the beginning?” He had just come away from a meeting of Poor Law Guardians, and was in a state of dissatisfaction with human nature generally.
“It is His way,” answered my mother. “The precious stone lies hid in clay. He has His purpose.”
“Is the stone so very precious?”