When the huge downpour came at last and by its miracle saved the crop which had been given up for lost a fortnight since, Mason cursed the day, for it fell on the first day of the week and cost him, item, one walk and talk with Georgia Connor. She stood so near his eyes as to hide from his sight a billion bushels parching in the valley—though he was country bred.
To her their Sundays together brought not a joy as definite as his, but rather a sense of contentment, of relief from the precision of the other days of her week. It pleased her to wander to the big aviary and look at the condors and cockatoos and wonder about South America where they came from, then to stroll slowly over to the animals and have a vague difference of opinion with him about whether a lion could whip a tiger.
She thought so because the lion was the king of beasts, but Mason didn't, because he'd read of a fight where it had been tried. Once he even grew a trifle heated because she wouldn't listen to reason and fact and stuck to the lion because he'd been called the king of beasts, whereas all naturalists knew the elephant and the gorilla and the rhinoc—— There she interrupted him with a laugh and called him a boy and too literal.
Every Sunday they had this same dispute until finally they both learned to laugh about it and made it a joke between them, and she told him he was doing much better. They walked by the inside lake and wondered if the wild ducks and geese on the wooded isle liked to have to stay there, and they took lunch when they got good and ready, perhaps not until two or three or even four o'clock in the afternoon.
She always went home for supper, but often she came out again afterwards, and took the car down town to a Sunday Evening Ethical Society which foregathered in an old-fashioned theatre building.
There was almost always some well-known speaker whose name was often in the papers, perhaps a professor or a radical Ohio Mayor or a labor lawyer, to address them on up-to-date topics like Municipal Ownership in Europe or the Russian Revolution or the Androcentric World, which showed women had as much right to vote as men, or non-resistance, a kind of Christianity that wasn't practical. Stevens didn't like that lecture much.
Jane Addams spoke once about the children that lived in her neighborhood. He thought her talk the best of all; so did Georgia. He said to her that Jane Addams was as much of a saint as any of those old-timers that were burnt and pulled to pieces and fed to lions, and a useful kind of a saint as well, because she helped children instead of just believing in something or other. Georgia didn't answer his remark at the time, but nearly half an hour later as she was bidding him good night she had him repeat it to her, and the next day she told him that what he had said about Miss Addams was very interesting.
They had organ music at these meetings and a collection, so that he felt it was the next thing to going to church. But Georgia in arguing out the matter with herself concluded that there was so little religion in the services that in attending them she violated the Church's law against worshiping with heretics hardly more than if she went to a political meeting. She would never go to a regular Protestant service with Mason, even if he asked her. She made up her mind firmly on that point. So perhaps it was as well he didn't ask her.
Her waking memories of Jim were now much fainter and dimmer. She tried not to think of him at all. She refused to let her mother or Al speak his name or make allusion to him. At the beginning, just after his departure, mama had harped on the subject until she thought it would drive her crazy.
Over and over and over again she traversed the same ground—about his being her husband, and Christian charity, and one more trial, and the disgrace of it, and that it was the first time such a thing ever happened in the family.