She came back to herself with a start. “The Statue and the Bust,” she
muttered. “We did that one, the winter before Isabel was born. I had
to drop out--and Mrs. Henderson sent me her notes. It was a shockingly
immoral thing, for the wife of a college president--a Presbyterian
minister, at that. I never had quite the same opinion of her, after I
read those notes. She said the lady who sat at the window and watched
for the duke to ride by--would have been less wicked if she had
actually run away with him. She said it was just as bad to want to
commit sin as to actually commit it--”
“Yes, if they restrained themselves only because of fear of the
consequences. There is no virtue in that kind of repression.”
To Lavinia Trench everything was personal. She turned the thought over
in her mind ... “afraid of the consequences” ... “no virtue in that
kind of repression.” Her whole life had been one of repression. Mrs.
Henderson had stressed the lines:
“And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”
“That isn’t my idea of sin. At least it wasn’t, until....” She trailed
off into incoherence, thumbing the pages nervously. “Judith, do you
think a woman--a married woman--could go on caring for some other
man--” She struggled with the obstruction in her throat. “I mean the
bride of Riccardi, in the poem. I can’t see how caring, and just
thinking how much she would like to be with him--was--wrong. She didn’t
commit any act of sin--didn’t break the seventh commandment.”
“In the eyes of the world she was a virtuous woman. In her own
heart she was an unsatisfied wanton. She added hypocrisy to the sin
of desire, and on that hypocrisy she wrecked her only chance for
happiness.”
V
Once before, Judith had attempted to implant an abstract idea in
Mrs. Trench’s mind. Now she was betrayed into a discussion of moral
responsibility, with no intent other than that of bridging over
a trying period of her none too comfortable relations with her
mother-in-law. That Lavinia would carry away even a germ of an idea,
she did not suspect. She had merely reiterated what Mrs. Henderson
had said, twenty years ago. As yet she had not fully perceived, in
that warped mind, one dominating characteristic: the ability to find
justification for anything that seemed desirable. True, Eileen had
said--but Eileen was not always fair in her old-time strictures on her
mother.
Judith looked at the abject figure, the pallid face and the hard mouth
... and pity overmastered her. She wanted to say something comforting.
The door was shut, the discussion ended. Lavinia sat there, pondering.
It was all so different from the groundwork of her religious training.
Probably Browning and Judith and Mrs. Henderson were wrong. To her
literal mind, their idea could not accord with the stern dictum: “The
wages of sin is death.” Still, their theory would serve to explain
Eileen. In her pondering, she went the length of formulating the
postulate: “Eileen sinned and became happy. Her sin was the source of
her regeneration.”
There must be something to it. She, Vine Larimore, had been
virtuous--and disaster had overtaken her. Lettie Fournier had sinned
... and for all the years of her subsequent life she had worn the
name of Calvin Stone. That this distinction brought her rival scant
happiness, was beside the point. The transgression of the moral law
was the barrier which both Lettie and Eileen had passed to the kind of
satisfaction that had been denied her. Judith had not told her of the
days and nights of self-purging. She saw only externals, and these were
all in favour of the Browning theory. After a long interval she said:
“Would you mind telling her--Eileen--that I want her to come to me? You
know better how to get hold of her. She thinks I don’t love her--that
I’m partial to Sylvia. I do love her ... and I want her at home with
me, where I can study her. It will be bitter enough dose for me to take
my lesson from her. But I am willing to do it, if she can show me the
way to happiness.” She looked incredibly old and tired and hopeless.
“And would you mind lending me your copy of Browning? I want to read
‘The Statue and the Bust’ through. Sylvia took mine with her when she
moved to Detroit. I didn’t think I would ever look at it again.”