"But Mary, my dear Mary," he said, "you don't mean to say you will allow such considerations to influence you?"
"I am a Catholic—what else can I do?" I said.
"But think—my dear, dear girl, think how unreasonable, how untrue, how preposterous it all is in a case like yours? God made your marriage? Yours? God married you to that notorious profligate? Can you believe it?"
His eyes were flaming. I dared not look at them.
"Then think again. They say there's no divorce in the Catholic Church, do they? But what are they talking about? Morally speaking you are a divorced woman already. Anybody with an ounce of brains can see that. When you were married to this man he made a contract with you, and he has broken the terms of it, hasn't he? Then where's the contract now? It doesn't any longer exist. Your husband has destroyed it."
"But isn't marriage different?" I asked.
And then I tried to tell him what the Bishop had said of the contract of marriage being unlike any other contract because God Himself had become a party to it.
"What?" he cried. "God become a party to a marriage like yours? My dear girl, only think! Think of what your marriage has been—the pride and vanity and self-seeking that conceived it, the compulsion that was put upon you to carry it through, and then the shame and the suffering and the wickedness and the sin of it! Was God a party to the making of a marriage like that?"
In his agitation he rose, walked two or three paces in front and came back to me.
"Then think what it means if your marriage may not be dissolved. It means that you must go on living with this man whose life is so degrading. Year in, year out, as long as your life lasts you must let him humiliate and corrupt you with his company, his companions and his example, until you are dragged down, down, down to the filth he lives in himself, and your very soul is contaminated. Is that what the Church asks of you?"