“And must poor woman be ruled by her own God, too?”

“Why not?”

“Well, it’s not so long ago that the fathers of the Church were debating in council whether she had a soul or not, charging her with bringing sin, sickness and death into the world.”

“Exactly.  St. John Damascene called her ’a daughter of falsehood and a sentinel of hell’; St. Jerome came in with ’Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion’; St. Gregory, I believe, considered her to have no comprehension of goodness; pious old Tertullian complimented her with corrupting those whom Satan dare not attack; and then there was St. Chrysostom—­really he was much more charitable than his fellow Saints—­it always seemed to me he was not only more humane but more human—­more interested, you might say.  You know he said, ’Woman is a necessary evil, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, a painted ill.’  It always seemed to me St. Chrysostom had a past.  But really, I think they all went too far.  I don’t know woman very well, but I suspect she has to find her moral authority where man finds his—­within herself.”

“You know what made me ask—­a little woman in town came to see Allan not long ago to know if she mightn’t leave her husband—­she had what seemed to her sufficient reason.”

“I imagine Allan said ‘no.’”

“He did.  Would you have advised her differently?”

“Bless you, no.  I’d advise her to obey her priest.  The fact that she consulted him shows that she has no law of her own.  St. Paul said this wise and deep thing:  ’I know and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him that esteemeth anything unclean, to him it is unclean!’”

“Then it lay in her own view of it.  If she had felt free to go, she would have done right to go.”

“Naturally.”

“Yet Allan talked to her about the sanctity of the home.”

“I doubt if the sanctity of the home is maintained by keeping unwilling mates together, Nance.  I can imagine nothing less sanctified than a home of that sort—­peopled by a couple held together against the desire of either or both.  The willing mates need no compulsion, and they’re the ones, it seems to me, that have given the home its reputation for sanctity.  I never thought much about divorce, but I can see that much at once.  Of course, Allan takes the Church’s attitude, which survives from a time when a woman was bought and owned; when the God of Moses classed her with the ox and the ass as a thing one must not covet.”

“You really think if a woman has made a failure of her marriage she has a right to break it.”

“That seems sound as a general law, Nance—­better for her to make a hundred failures, for that matter, than stay meekly in the first because of any superstition.  But, mind you, if she suspects that the Church may, after all, have succeeded in tying up the infinite with red-tape and sealing-wax—­believes that God is a large, dark notary-public who has recorded her marriage in a book—­she will do better to stay.  Doubtless the conceit of it will console her—­that the God who looks after the planets has an eye on her, to see that she makes but one guess about so uncertain a thing as a man.”