How Charity's motives stood in heaven there is no telling. It is
safe to say that they were the usual human mixture of selfish and
altruistic, wise and foolish, honorable and impudent, profitable
and ruinous. She came by the dictagraphic idea very gradually. She
had plentiful leisure since she had taken a distaste for good works.
She had been so roughly handled by the world she was toiling for
that she decided to let it get along for a while without her.
It was a benumbing shock to learn definitely that her husband was
in liaison with a definite person, and to be confronted in shabby
clothes with that person all dressed up. When she hurried to the
Church for mercy it was desolation to learn from the pulpit that
her heart clamor for divorce was not a cleanly and aseptic impulse,
but an impious contribution to the filthy social condition of the
United States.
Charity had no one to confide in, and she had no new grievance to
air. Everybody else had evidently been long assured of her husband's
profligacy. For her to wake up to it only now and run bruiting the
stale information would be a ridiculous nuisance--a newsgirl howling
yesterday's extra to to-day's busy crowd.
Besides, she had in her time known how uninteresting and unwelcome
is the celebrant of one's own misfortunes. Husbands and wives who
tell of their bad luck are entertaining only so long as they are
spicy and sportsmanlike. When they ask for a solution they are
embarrassing, since advice is impossible for moral people.
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