"There you are, you see!" exclaimed Gerald. "I tell you," he said, with a tug at his mustache, "that it's very difficult to cut people whom one has known all one's life, unless they've committed murder or embezzled."
"It isn't as though she were a bigamist or living in—in violation of the seventh commandment," remarked Mrs. Baxter dreamily, remembering just in time to round out her sentence with decorum for the benefit of Mr. Ward.
The rector jumped at the opportunity offered. "Isn't that just what she is doing? It is precisely that from the Church's point of view."
"If the Church would only pass a canon forbidding us to call on women who get divorced in order to marry someone else, it would be easier to take such a stand," remarked Mrs. Cole.
"But it isn't the divorce I mind so much. It's her selling Guendolen," exclaimed Mrs. Cunningham, with the honesty of her temperament. "We couldn't ostracize her simply because she has got a divorce and married again, for there are so many others." Her tone showed that she realized the impracticability of a social crusade based solely on the existence in the flesh of a previous wife or husband. Yet she yearned for action in this particular case. But what could one woman do alone?
"On the contrary, it seems to me a grand opportunity, ladies," said the clergyman stoutly. "The conduct of the offending parties in this instance represents individual selfishness and license carried to the culminating point. Because you may have neglected to do your duty in respect to the others is no justification for flinching now. It's the whole degraded system, root and branch, which I am fulminating against; but here we have a concrete, monstrous instance which invites action. Is ostracism never to be invoked, as Mr. Marcy intimates, except in the case of the taking of life or where the pocket is affected?"
There was a painful silence. For a wedding reception the discussion was becoming decidedly forensic.
"We must think it over," said Mrs. Cunningham. "If none of us women were to invite her to our houses or go to hers—" She paused without completing her sentence, evidently appalled by the vista of social complications which it opened up.
"There's nothing else in the wide world which Lydia would mind," said Mrs. Cole ruminantly. "But it would break her heart."
"Even a stone can break," Gerald could not refrain from whispering in the speaker's shell-like ear.