The Social Union itself, though not a brilliant success in all points, is
still not a failure; and the promise of its future is in the fact that it
continues to have a present. The people of Hatboro' are rather proud of
it, and strangers visit it as one of the possible solutions of one of the
social problems. It is predicted that it cannot go on; that it must either
do better or do worse; but it goes on the same.
Putney studies its existence in the light of his own infirmity, to which he
still yields from time to time, as he has always done. He professes to find
there a law which would account for a great many facts of human experience
otherwise inexplicable. He does not attempt to define this occult
preservative principle, but he offers himself and the Social Union as
proofs of its existence; and he argues that if they can only last long
enough they will finally be established in a virtue and prosperity as great
as those of Mr. Gerrish and his store.
Annie sometimes feels that nothing else can explain the maintenance of Lyra
Wilmington's peculiar domestic relations at the point which perpetually
invites comment and never justifies scandal. The situation seems to her as
lamentable as ever. She grieves over Lyra, and likes her, and laughs with
her; she no longer detests Jack Wilmington so much since he showed himself
so willing and helpful about the Social Union; she thinks there must be a
great deal of good in him, and sometimes she is sorry for him, and longs to
speak again to Lyra about the wrong she is doing him. One of the dangers
of having a very definite point of view is the temptation of abusing it to
read the whole riddle of the painful earth. Annie has permitted herself to
think of Lyra's position as one which would be impossible in a state of
things where there was neither poverty nor riches, and there was neither
luxury on one hand to allure, nor the fear of want to constrain on the
other.
When her recoil from the fulfilment of her volunteer pledge to Mr. Peck
brought her face to face with her own weakness, there were two ways back
to self-respect, either of which she might take. She might revert to her
first opinion of him, and fortify herself in that contempt and rejection of
his ideas, or she might abandon herself to them, with a vague intention of
reparation to him, and accept them to the last insinuation of their logic.
This was what she did, and while her life remained the same outwardly, it
was inwardly all changed. She never could tell by what steps she reached
her agreement with the minister's philosophy; perhaps, as a woman, it
was not possible she should; but she had a faith concerning it to which
she bore unswerving allegiance, and it was Putney's delight to witness
its revolutionary effect on an old Hatboro' Kilburn, the daughter of a
shrewd lawyer and canny politician like her father, and the heir of an
aristocratic tradition, a gentlewoman born and bred. He declared himself
a reactionary in comparison with her, and had the habit of taking the
conservative side against her. She was in the joke of this; but it was a
real trouble to her for a time that Dr. Morrell, after admitting the force
of her reasons, should be content to rest in a comfortable inconclusion
as to his conduct, till one day she reflected that this was what she was
herself doing, and that she differed from him only in the openness with
which she proclaimed her opinions. Being a woman, her opinions were treated
by the magnates of Hatboro' as a good joke, the harmless fantasies of an
old maid, which she would get rid of if she could get anybody to marry her;
being a lady, and very well off, they were received with deference, and
she was left to their uninterrupted enjoyment. Putney amused himself by
saying that she was the fiercest apostle of labour that never did a stroke
of work; but no one cared half so much for all that as for the question
whether her affair with Dr. Morrell was a friendship or a courtship. They
saw an activity of attention on his part which would justify the most
devout belief in the latter, and yet they were confronted with the fact
that it so long remained eventless. The two theories, one that she was
amusing herself with him, and the other that he was just playing with her,
divided public opinion, but they did not molest either of the parties to
the mystery; and the village, after a season of acute conjecture, quiesced
into that sarcastic sufferance of the anomaly into which it may have been
noticed that small communities are apt to subside from such occasions.
Except for some such irreconcilable as Mrs. Gerrish, it was a good joke
that if you could not find Dr. Morrell in his office after tea, you could
always find him at Miss Kilburn's. Perhaps it might have helped solve the
mystery if it had been known that she could not accept the situation,
whatever it really was, without satisfying herself upon two points, which
resolved themselves into one in the process of the inquiry.