“No one would be more loth than I ...” he said, “to classify as condemned all whose views do not coincide with the dictates of the Church. Let us rather call them mistaken.”
The suffragette shut in a renewed protest with a snap of her jaws. Although she badly needed a handle by which to seize the Brown Borough, surely there must be other handles than the Church. She determined secretly on determination as her unaided weapon.
But she went to see the Wigskys. She found them—a large family, red and mutually wrathful in an atmosphere of hot smells ancient and modern.
When she got inside the door she wondered why she had come. The baby screaming on its mother’s breast looked incorrigibly heathen, the eldest girl looked wholly unsuited to any “excellent place” discovered by the priest.
“Wooder you want?” asked the harassed mother, a drab and dusty creature, with the used look of cold ashes.
“I’ve come from Father Christopher ...” began the suffragette, wishing she had come from some one else.
“’N you can go back to Farver Christopher,” said Mrs. Wigsky. “Becos I ain’t goin’ to ’ave no more bibies christened. It’s ’eaven ’ere, an’ ’eaven there, this biby’s goin’ ter grow up ’eeven fer a chinge. It carn’t get us into worse trouble nor wot we’ve ’ad.”
“I haven’t come to bother you,” said the suffragette. “After all, it’s your baby, not Father Christopher’s.”
“That’s wot I ses,” said the mother, slightly mollified. “Well, if you ’aven’t come abaht Biby, wot ’ave you come for?”
“I’ve come because I want to find friends in the Brown Borough. If you don’t want me, please tell me to go.”