What was getting into the women? They would not obey anybody. Since Eve had mocked God and had desired only the one forbidden fruit, they seemed determined to enjoy only what was fatal.
And the books they read! RoBards came home one evening to find Immy in tears and Patty storming about her like a fury. When he intervened Patty said:
“Would you see what I caught this child devouring! Sitting with the gas blinding her and her eyes popping over this terrible story by somebody named Hawthorne. The title alone is enough to make a decent girl run from it. The Scarlet Letter. Do you know what the letter was and what it stood for?”
RoBards shook his head. He did not read light, popular fiction. The affidavits he handled were fiction enough for him.
Patty drew him into another room and whispered the plot of the story. RoBards gathered that it had to do with a Puritan minister who had a secret affair with the wife of an absent citizen, and with the child that resulted in the mother’s very proper appearance in the pillory.
“They ought to put the author there and sew a letter on his lapel.” Patty raged. “No wonder the people of Salem put him out of office and drove him out of town.”
There had been an article in the Church Review about the book. Patty fetched it and read a few lines to RoBards:
“Is the French era actually begun in our literature? We wonder what he would be at: whether he is making fun of all religion. Shelley himself never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the polluted minister comforts himself with the thought that the revenge of the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it.... The lady’s frailty is philosophized into a natural and easy result of the Scriptural law of marriage.”
That his daughter should read of such things sent a cold thrill into RoBards’ heart. He forgot that she had no innocence to destroy. Jud Lasher had wrecked that. Ernest Chirnside had rejected her for its lack. And he himself had watched her dance.
But the printed word had a peculiar damnation. He knew that wickedness was rife everywhere about him. He knew that Immy knew it, for the gossip was everywhere like the atmosphere. The newspapers blazoned it. The courthouses solemnized it.