“Unfortunately, this was not the end of it. The depths of human depravity were disclosed in the behavior of these gross men. Only last Sabbath, instead of going to church, they hung about the village. Most unluckily, the sheriff’s daughter carelessly went into the garden and picked a few currants for the midday dinner. Whereupon the laborers called on her father and demanded that he arrest his own daughter. He had to do it, too, and pay her fine of a shilling. It will be a lesson to the wicked girl, but it rather undoes the good I was able to impress on the laborers.”
Dr. Chirnside was aghast at such levity, such contempt for sacred things, but RoBards took no comfort in the thought that, since man’s quenchless thirst for horrors could be slaked with such trivial atrocities, his own tragedy was only one example more.
He felt an almost irresistible impulse to seize the clergyman by the sleeve and cry:
“What would you say if I told you of what has been going on in my own home? My wife is a member of your congregation; she has been brought up with every warning against immodesty of thought or action, and yet—and yet——”
He could not frame the story even in thought. He could not tell it. Yet if he did not tell, the secret would gnaw his heart away like a rat caged within.
Dr. Chirnside could hardly have found appropriate gloom for this disaster since he was already in such despair over the habits of the modern women, that he had no superlatives left for their dishonor.
As the stage swung down into the city, lurching through mudholes that occasionally compelled it to take to the sidewalk and scatter the pedestrians like chickens, he pointed out a girl strolling along with a greyhound on the leash of a blue silk ribbon.
“See how our girls walk abroad unattended,” he gasped. “That young female has at least a dog to protect her, but it is appalling how careless parents are. No wonder our foreign critics are aghast at the license we allow our ladies. They go about without a father or a husband to guard them from the insolence of bystanders. It is the custom, too, to permit couples who have been formally betrothed to be alone together without any guardian. In most of the homes sofas have been imported for them to sit upon. No wonder that New England people say that their old custom of bundling was less immodest. The very word sofa implies an Oriental luxury.
“The dress of our women, too, is absolutely disgusting. When I was young there was an outcry against a new fashion of shortening the skirts in the rear so that the heels were visible. People frankly cried ‘Shame!’ at the sight of them. Nowadays ankles are openly exposed. Look at that pretty creature stepping across the gutter. She is actually lifting her petticoats out of the mud. No wonder those men all crane their necks to ogle! And her satin shoes are hardly more than cobwebs!
“Their immodesty does not stop at the ankles. The bare bosom is seen! Really! I blush to mention what young females of excellent family do not blush to reveal.