All these years, when people have been blaming you and pitying me, I've
longed to burst out with the truth, to tell them what you were too
chivalrous to tell! For your sake and Anna's I couldn't do it, of
course, but you may imagine that it's made me a silent champion of
yours, just the same! But our marriage was a mistake, Jim," she went on
slowly and thoughtfully. "It was all very well for me to try to make
myself over; I couldn't make you! I never should have tried.
Theoretically, I had made a clean breast of it, and was forgiven; but
actually, the law was too strong. It's hard and strange that it should
be so, isn't it? I don't understand it; I never shall. For still it
seems as if the punishment followed, not so much the fact, as the fact's
being made known. If I had robbed some one fifteen years ago, or taken
the name of the Lord in vain, I wonder if it would have been the same?
As for keeping holy the seventh day, and honouring your father and
mother, and not coveting your neighbour's goods, how little they seem to
count! Even the most virtuous and rigid people would forgive and forget
fast enough in _those_ cases.
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