"Yet you wish to leave your husband?"
"How can I help it? The life I have been living is too horrible."
"Never mind that now. You wish to leave your husband, don't you?"
"I . . . I must."
"And you want to go to this . . . this young . . . in short, you want to go to Martin Conrad? That's the plain truth, isn't it? Don't deny it. Very well, let us call things by their proper names. What is the fact? You are asking me—me, your spiritual Father—to allow you to live a life of open adultery. That's what it comes to. You know it is, and God and His holy Mother have mercy on your soul!"
I was so startled and shocked by his fierce assault, and by the cruel climax it had come to, that I flung up my hands to my face and kept them there, for I felt as if my brain had been stunned and my heart was bursting.
How long I sat like this, with my hidden face to the fire, I do not know; but after a long silence in which I heard nothing but my own heaving breath, I became aware that Father Dan had drawn one of my hands down to his knee and was smoothing it with his own.
"Don't be angry with your old priest for telling you the truth," he said. "It's hard to bear; I know it's hard; but it's as hard for him as for you, my child. Think—only think what he is trying to save you from. If you do what you wish to do, you will put yourself out of communion. If you put yourself out of communion, you will cease to be a Catholic. What will become of you then, my daughter? What will be left to replace the consolations of the Church—in sorrow, in suffering, in the hour of death? Have you never thought of that?"
I never had. It was thrilling through and through me.
"You say you cannot live any longer with your husband because he has broken the vow he made to you at your marriage. But think how many many thousands of poor women all the world over are doing it every day—living with adulterous husbands for the sake of their homes and children. And not for the sake of their homes and children only, but for the sake of their souls and their religion. Blessed, blessed martyrs, though we know nothing about them, holding society and the Church and the human family together."