Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. From childhood she had thrilled to the creed and the music and the eloquence of her Sundays. The beautiful industries of Christianity had engaged her. She had been happy within the walls and had felt that her piety gave her wings rather than chains.
And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. She found her soul revolted by a situation which her pastor commanded her to accept as her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She found that it was better religion to annul her womanhood and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing opportunities the law allowed.
She came suddenly face to face with the terrifying fact that the State offered her help and strength that the Church denied her.
She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists would call “the parting of the ways,” though no poet has yet chosen for his heroine the distraught wretch who is driven to the bleak refuge of divorce.
So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity could put away the choice. But the more she pondered that unless she divorced her husband his mistress's baby would come into the world with a hideous birthmark, the more she felt it her duty to flout the Church. She shuddered to think of the future for that baby, especially if it should be a girl. She felt curiously a mother-obligation toward it. She blamed herself for her husband's infidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her neck to the shame.
She left the Church and went to the law. And then she found that the law had its own cruelties, its own fetters and walls and loopholes and hypocrisies. She found that it is not even possible to be a martyr and retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go to the stake without some guile.
The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband and a wife to part was something loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven.
“It seems to me,” she sighed, “if both husband and wife want a divorce, they know best; and that fact ought to be sufficient grounds in itself. And yet you tell me that if the law once gets wind of the fact they've got to live together forever.”
“That's it. They've got to live together whether they love together or not—though of course you can get a separation very easily, on almost any ground.”
“But a separation is only a guarantee of—of infidelity, I should think.”