The Eleventh Virgin · Part I · Chapter 1 3 (2/2)

“Maybe if I stayed out more and kept away from the books I am reading this restlessness would pass. Last night I sat up late over Dostoevsky and today my soul is like lead. During the last few weeks I’ve read all of Ibsen but he doesn’t make me sad. His plays are less depressing and the unhappiness that comes afterward is nothing more than a pleasant melancholy.

“I am sitting in my bedroom in my comfortable chair by the window. The wind is cold and seeps in through the glass so that I have to wrap my bathrobe about me while I write. I should be reading my Bible because it is Sunday afternoon, but I don’t want to. I’d rather write. I’m still in Acts. I never went over it so thoroughly before and now I find much more in it. Isn’t it queer how the same verse will strike you at different times? ‘We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.’ How true that is! Only after a hard, bitter struggle with sin and only after we have overcome it, do we experience blessed joy and peace. The tears come to my eyes when I think how often I have gone through the bitter struggles and then succumbed to some small sin while peace was in sight. And after I fell, how far away it fled. Poor weak creatures we are, yet God is our Father and God is love, ever-present, ready to enfold us and comfort us and hold us up.”

June paused here having reached a climax of righteousness and looked at Adele apprehensively. She didn’t care to have her sister read over her shoulder or jump suddenly and snatch what she had been writing as she sometimes did. Gripping the paper tightly, June went on.

“I have so much work to do to overcome my sins. I am working always⁠—always on guard, praying without ceasing to overcome all physical sensations and be purely spiritual.

“It is wrong to think so much about human love. All those feeling and craving that come to us are sexual desires. We are prone to have them at this age, I suppose. But I think that they are impure. It is sensual and God is spiritual. We must harden ourselves to these feelings, for God is love and God is all, so the only love is of God and is spiritual without taint of earthliness. I am afraid I have never really experienced this love or I would never desire the sensual love or the thrill that comes with the meeting of lips.

“I know it seems foolish to try to be so Christ-like⁠—but God says we can⁠—why else His command, ‘Be ye therefore perfect.’

“Oh, it surely is a continual strife and my spirit is weary.”

Finger cramp at this point put a check to the enthusiasm of self-expression, and June paused to survey a line of roofs whose dirty covering of snow was being replaced by a blue-white layer of fresh flakes, sifting slowly from a soft sky which hung low over the houses.

As she watched the scene, a desolate one and lifeless, as it seems the backs of houses always are on Sunday afternoons⁠—lifeless save for the animation of the falling snow, June reflected how dingy is the backyard aspect of things. Dimly, for she wasn’t able to reason about all her feelings as she had tried to do in figuring out the need for religion, she felt that her attitude in the letter to Henrietta was a backyard and dingy attitude, strangely lacking in beauty.

She could not have put it in words, but she realized that the conviction of sin which is so vital a part of religious feeling was ignoble, and that it was wicked to spend an hour on one’s knees in contemplation and repentance of one moment’s ecstasies which had to the girl’s budding womanhood the aesthetic value of a symphony or a beautiful poem.

What June could have put in words and what she did think was that it was really better for the soul to bask in the sun on a warm spring day, or walk in a snowy park when the twilight made deep blue shadows behind the trees, or to read beautiful poetry than to go to church.

And when she thought of poetry she thought of Swinburne’s Tristram which she had been reading and which was hidden back of the bookcase for safe keeping.

With the thought she picked up her diary and defiantly wrote:

“I should like to lie on the grass in the woods with a lover all night just like Tristram and Iseult. And I expect Adele feels the same way, so if she snoops for my diary and reads this, I don’t care. And I know she was in love all last summer, just as I was, otherwise why did she suddenly stop writing a diary after keeping one for two years, and then start again in the fall, unless she was afraid I’d find out about it?”

This protest against suppressions, suppressions which led only to an increase in her desire for beauty and excitement, satisfied her far more than her previous attempt at self-expression.

And so content both with the plate of fudge which she and Adele had consumed and with the temporary solution of her problems, she jumped up briskly.

“Come on, Adele,” she said, “I’m sick and tired of religion. I promise not to lecture you anymore, nor make you go to Wednesday night prayer-meetings. I’m going to the movies down the street and we’ve got to climb out the window over the shed. I begged the money from Dave. Mother’d have a fit rather than let us go. Glubb is so cranky today she’ll want us to take care of him when he wakes up from his nap. Wanna come?”

Adele hesitated a moment. Then she came over and hugged June tightly. “I’m glad you’re through with it. If you really meant it, it would have been all right, but you were playing a game and it made me so mad, we could only fight. Come on, let’s go. What do we care if we get a scolding when we get back?”