Célie--I don't know the pleadings of poverty, but one need not listen to them. There are many poor girls who go hungry and cold and keep from harm.
Clorinde--Child, their courage is sublime. Honor them if you will, but pity the cowards.
Célie--Yes, for choosing infamy rather than work, hunger, or death! Yes, for losing the respect of all honest souls! Yes, I can pity them for not being worthier of pity.
Clorinde--So that's your Christian charity! So nothing in the world--bitter repentance or agonies of suffering, or vows of sanctity for all time to come--may obliterate the past?
Célie--You force me to speak without knowledge. But--since I must give judgment--who really hates a fault will hate the fruit of it. If you keep this place, Madame, you will not expect me to believe in the genuineness of your renunciations.
Clorinde--I do not dishonor it. There is no reason why I should leave it. I have already proved my sincerity by high-minded and generous acts. I bear myself as my place demands. My conscience is at rest.
Célie--Your good action--for I believe you--is only the beginning of expiation. Virtue seems to me like a holy temple. You may leave it by a door with a single step, but to enter again you must climb up a hundred on your knees, beating your breast.
Clorinde--How rigid you all are, and how your parents train their first-born never to open the ranks! Oh, fortunate race! impenetrable phalanx of respectability, who make it impossible for the sinner to reform! You keep the way of repentance so rough that the foot of poor humanity cannot tread it. God will demand from you the lost souls whom your hardness has driven back to sin.
Célie--God, do you say? When good people forgive they betray his justice. For punishment is not retribution only, but the acknowledgment and recompense of those fighting ones that brave hunger and cold in a garret, Madame, yet do not surrender.
Clorinde--Go, child! I cannot bear more--