It is a fierce and searching test of a woman's mettle when first she is confronted with temptation to rebel against the control of her preacher. Men are used to it, and women must grow more and more used to it as they advance into their long-deferred heritage.

Charity Coe Cheever was religious by every instinct. From childhood she had thrilled to the creed and the music and the eloquence of her Sundays. The beautiful industries of Christianity had engaged her. She had been happy within the walls and had felt that her piety gave her wings rather than chains.

And then she came abruptly to the end of her tether. She found her soul revolted by a situation which her pastor commanded her to accept as her lifelong portion. She found that to tolerate, and by tolerating to collaborate in, the adultery of her husband and his mistress was better religion than to free herself from odious triplicity. She found that it was better religion to annul her womanhood and remain childless, husbandless, and comfortless than to claim the privileges, the freedoms, the renewing opportunities the law allowed.

She came suddenly face to face with the terrifying fact that the State offered her help and strength that the Church denied her.

She had reached indeed what the doleful balladists would call “the parting of the ways,” though no poet has yet chosen for his heroine the distraught wretch who is driven to the bleak refuge of divorce.

So long as it concerned only her own happiness Charity could put away the choice. But the more she pondered that unless she divorced her husband his mistress's baby would come into the world with a hideous birthmark, the more she felt it her duty to flout the Church. She shuddered to think of the future for that baby, especially if it should be a girl. She felt curiously a mother-obligation toward it. She blamed herself for her husband's infidelity. She humbled herself and bowed her neck to the shame.

She left the Church and went to the law. And then she found that the law had its own cruelties, its own fetters and walls and loopholes and hypocrisies. She found that it is not even possible to be a martyr and retain all one's dignity. One cannot even go to the stake without some guile.

The wicked law which the Church abhorred had its own idea of wickedness, and in the eyes of the law the agreement of a husband and a wife to part was something loathsome. She expressed her amazement to McNiven.

“It seems to me,” she sighed, “if both husband and wife want a divorce, they know best; and that fact ought to be sufficient grounds in itself. And yet you tell me that if the law once gets wind of the fact they've got to live together forever.”

“That's it. They've got to live together whether they love together or not—though of course you can get a separation very easily, on almost any ground.”

“But a separation is only a guarantee of—of infidelity, I should think.”

“Of course it is,” said Lawyer McNiven.

“Then everything seems all wrong.”

“Of course it is.”

“Then why doesn't somebody correct it?”

“Who's going to bell the cat? Anybody who advocates divorce by mutual consent is sure to be lynched more or less fatally, and especially lynched by the very people who are making a mockery of matrimony in their own lives.

“One marriage in twelve in the United States ends in divorce. You'll not find anybody who dares to say that that is not a crying scandal. Yet you and I know that home life in America is as pure and honorable as in any other country. I'm an awful heathen, of course, but I'll bet you I'm a true prophet when I say that divorce will increase as the world goes on, instead of decreasing, and that in all the countries where divorce is forbidden or restricted it will grow freer and freer. Statistics prove it all over the globe.”

To Charity Coe, the devout churchwoman, this picture was appalling.

“Oh, in Heaven's name, what will happen? The world will go all to pieces!”

“That's what they said when men asked for the vote and for education, when women asked for education and the vote; that's what they said when people opposed the divine right of kings, and when they asked for religious freedom; that's what they said when people opposed slavery; that's what they said when people said that insane people were not inhabited by devils and should be treated as invalids. The trouble, Charity, is that a certain spirit has always been abroad in the world fighting imaginary devils with the best intentions in the world. And in all history there has never been anybody so dangerous to human welfare as the zealot who wants to protect other people from themselves and from the devils.

“The insane people were never inhabited by devils, and neither are the sane people. Most men want one wife and most women want one husband. Even in the polygamous countries you'll not find any more real polygamy than you find in the countries with the strictest marriage laws. Bluebeard was a Mohammedan, but Don Juan was a Christian. Spain has no divorce on any grounds; neither has Italy. Would you point to those countries as models of domestic purity? Does any sane person dare say that home life in Spain is purer than in the United States?

“I tell you, easy divorce goes right along with merciful laws, public schools, clean prisons, free press, free speech.”

Mrs. Cheever was a very good woman, and she abominated divorces. She had very peculiar reasons for wanting one herself, as every one has who wants one, but she felt her case to be so exceptional that it proved the rule against divorces. She shrank a little from the iconoclastic lawyer she had come to for aid, and reminded him of the solemnity of the theme.

“Don't you believe in the sanctity of matrimony?”

“Just as much as I believe in the sanctity of personal liberty and a contract and a debt and the obligation to vote and bear arms and equality of opportunity and responsibility and—oh, a lot of other sacred things—just as much and no more.”

“But the Church calls marriage a sacrament.”

“It does now, yes; but it didn't for over fifteen hundred years.”

“What!”

“It's true. The trouble with you religious people is that you never know the history of your own religion. And remember one more thing: the marriage rules of the Christian Church are all founded on the theories of men who never married. No wonder they found it easy to lay down hard and fast rules. Remember another thing: the early Church fathers, Saint Paul, Hieronymus, and thousands of others, believed that marriage was only a little bit better than the worst evil, and that womankind was hardly more than the devil's natural weapon.

“It was not until the Church was eleven hundred and sixty-four years old that Peter Lombard put marriage among the seven sacraments. And marriage did not become an official matter of Church jurisdiction till the Council of Trent in fifteen hundred and sixty-three. Think of that! Marriage was not a sacrament for fifteen centuries, and it has been one for less than four. And at that the Church could only manage the problem by increasing the number of impediments to marriage, which meant that it increased the number of excuses for annulling it.

“The total number of marriages annulled would amaze you. History is full of the most picturesque devices for granting divorce without seeming to. Sometimes they would illegitimize two or three generations in order to find a marriage within the forbidden degrees.

“According to Saint Matthew, Christ allowed divorce on the ground of adultery; according to Mark and Luke he made no such allowance. New York State follows Saint Matthew. The Catholic Church follows Luke and John. Old Martin Luther said that marriage was none of the Church's business. And that's what I think.”

“You don't believe in the religious ceremony?”

“I'm afraid I don't believe in religious ceremonies about anything. I'm rather a heathen, you know—brought up in a good Presbyterian Calvinistic atmosphere, but I've lost it all. I'll give three cheers for virtue and the home as well as anybody; but my study and my experience lead me to distrust preachers and preaching.

“Still, this is a free country, and married people have a right to go to church if they want to, or to stay away. But I believe that marriage must be a civil contract and that no preacher has a right to denounce the State's prerogative, or try to belittle it. It is strange, but true, that when the Church has ruled the State the world has always groaned in corruption and cruelty.

“I believe that the law of New York is ridiculous in allowing only one ground for divorce, and if the United States ever arranges a uniform divorce law it will undoubtedly follow the policy of the more liberal States. I believe, with Bernard Shaw and John Galsworthy and a number of other good, great men, in cheap and easy divorce, divorce within reach of the poor.

“As for morality, you have only to read the literature of the time when there was no divorce to realize how little a safeguard it is for the home. Boccaccio gives a social portrait of such a life, and he is almost too indecent to read. Yet the picture he gives is not half so terrible as Saint Catherine of Siena gives. They had to cut that chapter out of her works.”

“Oh, do you read her works, too?” said Charity, remembering her experience with that flaming biography.

“I read a little of everybody. But everything I read and see confirms my opinion that too much law is the curse of the world. Still, as I say, I'm not a lawmaker. I'm a law-manipulator. I've been wondering how long you would stand Cheever's scandalous behavior, and how long you could be convinced that you were helping the morals of the world by condoning and encouraging such immorality. Now that you've brought your troubles to my shop I'm going to help you if I can. But I don't want to get you or myself into the clutches of the law. You'll have to take care of your Church relations as best you can. They may turn you out, and you may roast on a gridiron hereafter, but that's your business. Personally, I think the only wicked thing I've ever heard of you doing was permitting your husband to board and lodge at your house while he carried on with that—woman. A harem divided against itself will not stand.”

Charity was terrified by the man's profane view of sacred things, and she was horrified to learn that she could only release herself and Cheever from the shackles by a kind of trickery. She would have to make her escape somewhat as she had seen Houdini break from his ropes in the vaudevilles, by retiring behind dark curtains for a while.

She felt guilty and craven whichever way she turned, and she imagined the revulsion with which the good pastor would regard her. Yet she was in a kind of mania to accept the scapegoat's burdens and be off into the wilderness. She was resolved to undergo everything for the sake of that poor child of Zada's hastening toward the world. She thanked Heaven she had no child of her own to complicate her duty.

She understood why Cheever wanted to protect the name of the child's mother from the courts, and she was baffled by the situation. The lawyer, who was so flippant about the things the Church held so sacred, was like a priest in his abhorrence of any tampering with the letter of the law.

She left his office for a conference with Cheever. She found at home that he had been telephoning to her. She called him up, and he came over at once.

“I'm in a devil of a mess, Charity,” he said. “My lawyer refuses to help me give you evidence, and Zada—Miss L'Etoile—has developed a peculiar streak of obstinacy. She is determined that no other woman shall be named as the—er—co-respondent. She would rather be named herself. She says everybody knows about our—er—relations, anyway; and she doesn't care if they do.”

Zada's character and her career had rendered her as contemptuous of public disapproval as any zealot of a loftier cause than love. There was a kind of barbaric insolence in her passion that Charity could not help admiring a little. She felt a whit ashamed of her own timidities and delicacies. The trouble with these proud defiers of the public, however, is that they do not ask the consent of the babies that are more or less implied in their superb amours.

Cheever was so distracted between the scruples of his lawyer and Zada's lack of them that when Charity confessed how she had set detectives on him and had secured a dictagraphic record of his alliance with Zada he was overcome with gratitude.

So little a shift of circumstances makes all the difference between a spy and a savior. The deed that he would once have cursed his wife for stooping to, perhaps have beaten her for, was now an occasion for overwhelming her with thanks.

He hurried away to his lawyer, and Charity telephoned McNiven for another appointment the next afternoon. Jim Dyckman's appointment was for the next morning.