linched
and his teeth set hard.

XIII.

"Martha's.

"Oh, Lord-a-massy! Oh, Gough bless me sowl! Oh, my beloved grandfather!
John Storm has done for himself at last! That man was never an author of
peace and a lover of concord; but, my gracious, if you had heard his
sermon in church on Sunday morning! Being a holy and humble woman of
heart myself, I altered the Litany the smallest taste possible, and
muttered away from beginning to end, 'O Lord, close thou our lips'; but
the Lord didn't heed me in the least, with the result that everybody on
earth is now screaming and snarling at our poor Mr. Storm exactly as if
he had been picking the pockets of the universe.

"It was all about the morality of men. The text was as innocent as a
baby: 'Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the
flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.' And when he began in the usual way,
the dear old goodies in glasses thought he had been wound up like the
musical box and had just turned on the crank, so they cuddled in
comfortably for forty winks before the anthem. There were two natures in
man, and man's body might be good or bad according as spiritual or
carnal affections swayed it, and all the rest of the good old
change-for-sixpence-and-a-ha'penny-out, you know. But the lesson had been
from Isaiah, where the unreasonable old prophet is indignant with the
ladies of Zion because they don't want to look like dowdies, you
remember: 'Tremble, ye women that are at ease, strip you and make you
bare and gird sackcloth upon your loins.' And off he went like a comet,
with the fashionable woman for his tail. If matrimony nowadays didn't
always mean monogamy, who was chiefly to blame? Men were generally as
pure as women required that they should be; and if the lives of men were
bad it was often because women did not demand that they should be good.
Tremble, ye women, that are at ease, and say why you allow your daughters
to marry men who in fact and effect are married already. Strip you, and
be ashamed for the poor women who were the first wives of your daughters'
husbands, and for the children whom such men abandon and forget! In
leading your innocent daughters to courts and receptions you are only
leading them to the auction-room; and in dressing and decorating them you
are preparing them for the market of base men. Last week some titled
philanthropist had hauled up a woman in the East End of London for
attempting to sell her daughter