The word seemed to hold a horrid fascination for Cis.
Mr. Lucas fell back in his chair and stared at Cis, trying to get his bearings.
“Divorced?” he echoed. “Oh, but, my girl, that’s another matter! Of course remarriage is not bigamy when the state has freed a man. Then he has no wife, so his marriage to a second one is not bigamy; it is as if the first one were dead.”
Cis shook her head. “No, Mr. Lucas,” she said, “it really isn’t; how could it be? Suppose I were walking with Rod, had married him, and we met his first wife. It wouldn’t be the same as if she were dead, would it? There’d be two of us, both alive. How do you suppose I’d feel; how would any decent girl feel? Besides, Mr. Lucas, Rod was married by a priest, and no one can break those marriages. I’d have had to give up God to marry Rod, and how could I?”
Mr. Lucas frowned angrily.
“It’s that abominable Roman tyranny again,” he cried. “How in the name of all that’s sane do those priests get hold of minds the way they do? You poor little victim of man-made laws, posing for Divine ones, have you wrecked your life and a man’s life for this nonsense?”
“No, Mr. Lucas,” said Cis with a weary little gasp for breath, but not in the least shaken. “You are ever so much wiser than I, but I know that is not true. Our Lord Himself said that a divorced person could not be married, and what can you do when He tells you anything? I think I can see why it has to be, because outside the Catholic Church people keep going in and out of marriages till you’d think they’d be dizzy. And then there are the children. No, Mr. Lucas, it’s all right, even though it hurts. And, anyway, how could I turn my back on the Church? God’s there.”
“You told me once that you were—what’s their term for it?—an indifferent Catholic. That you weren’t devout like some friend of yours, or was it Jeanette Lucas? Yet you make the choice of your Church instead of your happiness! I see what it has cost you; your face betrays your suffering. You, who could not stand firm against your lover’s pleading to you to put him in the way of making money, only of making money; who did violence to your hatred of not ‘being square,’ as you put it, you leave him, throw him over, infuriate him, wound his pride, as well as his love of you—for no man would do less than curse a woman for thus failing him after he had let her have the chance to choose—all for an idea; for allegiance to a system; to keep within a Church which was not especially dear to you! And this when the laws of your country would justify your choosing the man, would place their seal upon your position in society as his wife! My heavens, Cicely Adair, what is it, what can it be that can so mold you into a Christian martyr, singing as the wild beasts rend her?”
Mr. Lucas sat erect, frowning heavily, his eyes flashing, for the problem before him stirred him to his depths. He had already encountered it in his brother’s conduct; he resisted the one explanation of it which his reason presented to him.
Cis smiled her pitiful, funny little shadow of her normal bright, amused smile, and looked up at Mr. Lucas, saying: