To be sure, one village theologian was heard to cry:
“Empty or full, I tell you them churches are all necessary, every one of ’em. And if we had more kinds of ’em, then they’d be necessary too.”
But there seemed to be something the matter with this. And on the whole there is more food for thought in another observation from among us:
“We always used to think Drug-store Curtsie was an infidel. And, land, there he is making the best State Senator we ever had. I guess we exaggerated it some, maybe.”
We are beginning to be ashamed of charity and to see that our half dozen dependent families need not have been dependent, if their own gifts had been developed and their industry had not been ill-directed or exploited. And if that is true of the Rickers and the Hennings and the Hasketts and the Bettses and the Doles, we begin to suspect that it may be true of all poverty. We are beginning to be ashamed of many another inefficiency and folly which anciently we took for granted as necessary evils. Of his own product the village brewer says openly: “The time is coming when they won’t let us make it. And I don’t care how soon it comes.” And this in the village, where we used to laugh at Keddie Bingy, drunken and singing on Daphne Street, and whose wife we censured for leaving him to shift for himself!
We are coming to applaud divorce when shame or faithlessness or disease or needless invalidism have attended marriage, and for a village woman to continue to earn her livelihood by marriage under these circumstances is now to her a disgrace hardly less evident than that of her city sister. We continue to cover up far too much, just as in the cities they cover too much. But we do mention openly things which in the old days we whispered or guessed at or whose peril we never knew at all. And when, by a visiting lecturer, more is admitted than we would ourselves admit, we are splendidly, if softly, triumphant with: “That couldn’t have been done here twenty years ago.”
To be sure, with some of the new terminology, we have had desperate battle.
”I don’t like them eugenics,” one of us said, “I know two of ’em that’s separated.”
Yet on the whole we tell one another that our new state law is “going to be” a good thing.
Inevitably, then, romance among us is becoming something else. The village girl no longer waits at the gate in a blue sash. There are no gates. She is wearing belts. And I heard one of the girls of the village say: