“Why not spring our building scheme on the people at once, without authority from the Board of Trustees, and make it the rallying cry of the new Humanity?” he cried eagerly.
“I believe it will succeed,” she answered, her heart glowing with the consciousness of the intimacy of that little word “our” he had used.
She got pad and pencil, and Gordon dictated to her a plan for engaging every force of the church and its congregation and various societies in the project.
He fixed the Sunday on which to make the effort of his life in his appeal to the people of his congregation and the world for the million-dollar fund needed. It was eleven o’clock before they finished the discussion of the scheme, and aglow with enthusiasm he left for his home.
As he sat down in the car and lived over again his happiness of the past hours in this woman’s companionship the paradox of his return in a few minutes to the arms of his wife struck him squarely in the face for the first time.
He could not plead a mistake in his first love. His romance was genuine. He had loved with all the fire of his youth. The passion which drew him to Ruth was mutual and resistless. Yet its ardour had cooled. He could not say it was his fault, not altogether hers. It seemed as inevitable in its decline as its onrush was resistless. Yet at the thought of this new woman he felt his heart beat with quicker stroke. He was older and stronger than the youth of the past, and the woman more mature in the ripened glory of beauty.
Yet he began to recall with infinite tenderness the love life with Ruth. Its memories were very real and very sweet. And the faces of his children haunted him with strange power. The idea of a divorce from Ruth and the loss of these children cut him with sharp pain.
Had he outgrown his first love? Could he continue to live with one woman if he loved another? Was not this the one unpardonable sin and shame? And yet to break that bond and form the other if he could meant the end of associations in which the fibers of his very life were wrought.
But was not this one of the burning problems of the new humanity, this freedom of the soul and body, this new birth into the liberty and love of a great Brotherhood? Was not sham and hypocrisy now the law of life, and was not Society perishing because of it?
Thus wrestling with the tragic dilemma he felt closing about him, he went past his station to the end of the line and had to take the down train back. It was past midnight when he reached his home.