She felt that wives ought to wear some
special kind of plume, the price of the feather varying with the
bank account. Kedzie would have had to carry an umbrella of plumes.
Still, she did pretty well on her exit. She went out like a million
dollars. But her haughtiness fell from her when she reached home
and found Mr. and Mrs. Thropp comfortably installed there, saving
hotel bills.
Charity Coe had gone out feeling a million years old. She left
the presence of Kedzie in a mood of tragic laughter. She was
in one of those contemptible, ridiculous plights in which good
people frequently find themselves as a result of kindliness and
self-sacrifice.
For well-meant actions are as often and as heavily punished in
this world as ill-meant--if indeed the word _punishment_ has
any respectability left. It is certainly obsolescent.
Many great good men, such as Brand Whitlock, the saint of Belgium,
had been saying that the whole idea of human punishment of human
beings is false, cruel, and futile, that it has never accomplished
anything worth while for either victim or inflictor. They place it
among the ugly follies, the bloody superstitions that mankind has
clung to with a fanaticism impervious to experience. They would
change the prisons from hells to schools and hospitals.
Even the doctrine of a hell beyond the grave is rather neglected
now, except by such sulphuric press agents as Mr. Sunday. But in
this world we cannot sanely allege that vice is punished and virtue
rewarded until we know better what virtue is and what is vice.
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