When they reached home she bade Cheever a perfectly cheerful good-night and left him to a cold supper the butler had laid out for him. She did not know that he stole from the house and flew to Zada.
Charity was tempted to an immediate denunciation of Cheever and a declaration of divorce. She would certainly not live with him another day. That would be to make herself an accomplice, a silent partner of Zada's. It would be intolerable, immoral, not nice.
CHAPTER XIII
The next morning proved to be a Sunday and she felt a need of spiritual help in her hour of affliction. Man had betrayed her; religion would sustain her grim determination to end the unwholesome condition of her household. The Bible said (didn't it?), “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.” That surely meant, “If thy husband offend thee, divorce him.”
She went to church, her ancestral Episcopalian church, where her revered Doctor Mosely, the kindliest old gentleman in the world, had poured sermons down at her like ointment and sent prayers up like smoke since she was a little girl. But on this day he chose to preach a ferocious harangue against divorce as the chief peril, the ruination of modern society.
The cowering Charity got from him the impression that home life had always been flawless in this country until the last few years, when divorce began to prosper, and that domestic life in countries where there is little or no divorce had always been an unmitigated success. If only divorce and remarriage were ended, the millennium of our fathers would return.
This had not been her previous opinion; it was her vivid impression from Doctor Mosely, as honest an old darling as ever ran facts through a sieve and threw away all the big chunks that would not go through the fine mesh of his prejudices. He abhorred falsehood, cruelty, skepticism, sectarianism, and narrowness, and his sermons were unconscious mixtures of hand-picked truth and eloquent legends, ruthless denunciations of misunderstood people and views, atheism toward the revelations of all the sciences (particularly the science of biblical criticism, which he hated worse than he hated Haeckel), and a narrowness that kept trying to sharpen itself into a razor edge.
Fortunately he belied in his life almost all of his pulpit crimes and moved about, a tender, chivalrous, lovable old gentleman. It was this phase that Charity knew, for she had not heard one of his sermons for a year or more, though she saw him often in his parish work. She was the more amenable to his pulpit logic to-day.