“Mrs. Wilbur,” he exclaimed at last, his eyes rising above her head restlessly, “what a privilege is yours, with the ability and the means to further the moral and material welfare of this great city! Chicago is the great home for intelligent woman. Here she moulds the destinies, the civilization of millions of eager human beings. In our vast city,” his voice rose and fell in prophetic intonations, “woman does not creep as the humble hand-maiden of charity; she organizes immense reforms, she institutes educational benefits, she advances shoulder to shoulder with men in a common fight against the demons of want and vice.”
His victim sat in mystified silence. She saw before her eyes the new church, three blocks away on a neighbouring boulevard, its auditorium in the form of a theatre, with the stage crowned by a high pulpit, which Dr. Driver mounted. Behind were rows of shiny organ pipes, and below at the wing a small door that led to the club-rooms, and eating-rooms, and kitchens, and carpeted assembly-rooms, all in polished oak panelling and furniture, with every modern device of the up-to-date house of God. The doctor should be there, exhorting his comfortable audience, not here distracting her mind during the hours she needed most for clear thinking and clear feeling. Dr. Driver came soon, however, to more specific matter.
“My dear Mrs. Wilbur,” he lowered his voice and eyes simultaneously. “I have prayed over you, wondering if you have realized to the fullest your powers and opportunities to do God’s work.”
“I trust so,” his parishioner replied impatiently, feeling that now he was drawing to the purpose of his visit.
“Are you not planning,” Dr. Driver’s voice grew deeper, more threatening, “in your breast to-day, this very hour, to abandon God’s work in his appointed pasture, to turn back like Lot’s wife from the vineyard before you, to forsake husband and home in the pursuit of vain pleasures, of a vainglorious conceited refinement of culture? Are you not planning, I ask you as a daughter of the church, to make a god of your intellectual belly?”
Mrs. Wilbur’s face flushed resentfully. “My husband, has told you of my proposal to leave his home,” she interposed in the torrent of rhetoric.
“Yes. He came to me in the travail of his soul this morning, to his spiritual counsellor, for my poor help in his trouble.”
“He did a very foolish thing,” Mrs. Wilbur replied haughtily.
“I trust not so. You love your husband, you loved your little child, his child, and you will love others yet to be—”
At another time Mrs. Wilbur could have tolerated Dr. Driver’s exhortation as merely an exhibition of well-meaning bad taste. To-day she was capable of blasphemies against the bed-rock truths of her fellowmen. If they goaded her, stung her like little flies, she would give the lie to her heart and commit outrages.