In any case, not only was Charity divorced, but she had been involved in Jim's divorce, and Jim, as the New Jersey preacher pointed out to him, was denied remarriage even by the civil law of New York. The appeal to New Jersey was plainly a subterfuge, and he begged Jim to give Charity up.
“You don't know what you ask,” Jim cried. “I'll find somebody with a heart!” And he stormed out.
CHAPTER XVI
Jim reported to Charity his two defeats and the language he had heard and read. Charity's conscience was so clean that her reaction was one of wrath. She pondered her future and Jim's. She could not see what either of them had done so vile that they should be sentenced to celibacy for life, or more probably to an eventual inevitable horror of outward conformity and secret intrigue.
She knew too many people whose wedlock had been a lifelong tolerance of infamy on the part of one or both. Some of the bitterest enemies of divorce were persons who had found it quite unnecessary. She felt that to forgive and to forget became so anti-social a habit in matrimony that no divorce could be worse.
She was afraid of herself, too. She dared not trust herself with life alone. She was too human to be safe. Marriage with Jim would protect him and her from each other and from the numberless temptations awaiting them. Finally, there were no children in the matter.
All arguments prove too much and too little, and in the end become simply our own briefs for our own inclinations. Charity's mood being what it was, she adopted the line of reasoning that led to her own ambition. She spent much time on her knees, but communed chiefly with herself, and rose always confirmed in her belief that to marry Jim Dyckman was the next great business of her existence.
Jim, too, had grown unwontedly earnest. The marriage denounced by the religious had taken on a religious quality. He was inclined to battle for it as for a creed, as the clergymen had battled vainly for the new canon.