The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the
anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized lust without an
identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his
grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced,
incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged
Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world
surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him;
hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a
universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely
departed, he felt, from the truth.
Why was it that virtue, continence, corroded the heart? Why did people
who, through predilection, went to churches, regard those who didn't
with such an insistent animosity? Why did the church itself seek to
obliterate--as though they were a breathing menace--all who stood
outside its doors? There was something terribly wrong in the reaction
of life to religion, or in the religion that was applied to life. It
began, in the symbolical person of Christ, with, at least, a measure of
generosity; but that had been long lost. Now the bitterness of the
religious rather resembled envy.
In the picture flickering on the screen the girl who had suffered the
agonies of birth sat, with her baby on her young lap, in the forlorn
room of a village boarding house.
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