It was well for his peace of mind that he did not go to her just then; for the first time in his life he would have been refused admittance to his mother's room. Ruth Erskine Burnham had shut herself away as much as she could from her outside world, and was fighting the battle of her life. A wild temptation was upon her, so strong that in its first strength she could not have resisted it, had she tried, and she did not try. It was so transformed that it did not appear to her as a temptation, but as a duty. Erskine's wife had deceived him; not once, in a crucial moment, but steadily, deliberately, continuously. Not only had she posed for him as a widow, but she had given him vivid pictures of her girlish desolation in her widowhood. His mother knew this, for Erskine had reproduced some of them in a few delicate touches, with the evident object of awakening in her a tender sympathy for one who, though so young, had suffered much.
"Young!" indeed! she had even stooped to the low and petty deception of making herself out to be much younger than she was! could an honorable man condone such small and unnecessary meannesses as that? Especially in his wife! And Erskine was married to her. Erskine of all men in the world the husband of a divorced woman! And he was on record in the public journals as one who had denounced with no gentle tongue the whole system of legal divorce as permitted in this country; he had characterized it as unrighteous and infamous. Young as he was, he had made himself felt in legal circles along this very line, and was recognized as a strong advocate for better laws and purer living.
So pronounced had he been on this whole subject that certain of his brother lawyers who, in the main, agreed with his views, did not hesitate to tell him that he was too severe, and was trying to accomplish the impossible. His mother, in the light of her recently acquired knowledge, laughed, a cruel laugh, then shivered and turned pale over the memory of a recent conversation which had now grown significant.
The pastor of their church, Mr. Conway's successor, was dining with them, and the talk had turned for a moment on the recent marriage of one of the parties in a famous divorce suit. Erskine had declared that if he were a clergyman, he should consider it his privilege as well as duty to anticipate the law that was surely coming and refuse to perform the marriage ceremony for a divorced person.