"
"There are a thousand promises made every day which nobody is
expected to keep. It is the custom, the way of the world! How
many of the clergy, now, believe the things they put their names
to?"
"They must answer for themselves. We are not clergymen, but
women, who ought never to say a thing except we mean it, and,
when we have said it, to stick to it."
"But just look around you, and see how many there are in
precisely the same position! Will you dare to say they are all
going to be lost because they do not behave like angels to their
brutes of husbands?"
"I say, they have got to repent of behaving to their husbands as
their husbands behave to them."
"And what if they don't?"
Mary paused a little.
"Do you expect to go to heaven, ma'am?" she asked
"I hope so."
"Do you think you will like it?"
"I must say, I think it will be rather dull."
"Then, to use your own word, you must be very like lost anyway.
There does not seem to be a right place for you anywhere, and
that is very like being lost--is it not?"
Hesper laughed.
"I am pretty comfortable where I am," she said.
"Husband and all!" thought Mary, but she did not say that. What
she did say was:
"But you know you can't stay here. God is not going to keep up
this way of things for you; can you ask it, seeing you don't care
a straw what he wants of you? But I have sometimes thought, What
if hell be just a place where God gives everybody everything she
wants, and lets everybody do whatever she likes, without once
coming nigh to interfere! What a hell that would be! For God's
presence in the very being, and nothing else, is bliss.
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