Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/111

kissed the word savagely away.) He is not at all religious. Why does this make me feel as if I ought to become so? I have never thought much about the philosophy of Christianity—I mean as a practical matter that had anything in particular to do with myself—until lately.

"You are a sumptuous little pagan," he said to me Saturday. Now, this did not please me, as he seemed to expect. It left a little dust, like ashes of roses, in my heart. I feel as if I had failed him somewhere.

"I am afraid I am too happy to be religious," I said.

"Then stay irreligious!" he cried. The plea of his lips smothered that spark of sacred feeling; and against the argument of his arms I cannot reason.

How fearful is the philosophy of a kiss! When I think of poor girls—young, ignorant, all woman and all love—I never thought of them before except with a kind of bewildered horror.

I wonder—to anchor to my thought; see, even my thought casts off its moorings as well as my feeling; I seem to be adrift on all sides of my being—I wonder if it is in the nature of suffering to make people in so far divine as it is in that of joy to keep them altogether human.