Mrs. Alderling said, “I don’t care for it in my case.” That struck me as rather touching, but I had no right to enter uninvited into the intimacy of her meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, “Aren’t you both rather belated?”
“You mean that protoplasm has gone out?” he chuckled.
“Not exactly,” I answered. “But you know that a great many things are allowed now that were once forbidden to the True Disbeliever.”
“You mean that we may trust in the promises, as they used to be called, and still keep the Unfaith?”
“Something like that.”
Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the pleasure of teasing his wife.
“That’ll be a great comfort to Marion,” he said, and he threw back his head and laughed.
She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she enjoyed his pleasure in teasing her.
“Where have you been,” I asked, “that you don’t know the changed attitude in these matters?”
“Well, here for the last three years. We tried it the first winter after we came, and found it was not so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I haven’t really looked into the question since I gave the conundrum up twenty years ago, on what was then the best authority. Marion doesn’t complain. She knew what I was when she married me. She was another. We were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We should not have burned anybody at the stake for saying that we had souls.”