Skinny Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

and put a stop to that nonsense. Same thing will happen to young Muir. You can bet on it."
    "And yet he struck me as being almost passionately sincere."
    John did not reply; he was too busy clearing his throat, a serious and noisy business. She waited until he had finished.
    "I said he seemed so sincere, John."
    "Sincere? Who?"
    "Gordon Muir. About never marrying."
    "Oh, fiddle. Lot of nonsense. He probably imagines he's sweet on Mrs. Bullock."
    Jane was so aghast at this abrupt and casual confirmation of her most dire suspicions that she did not trust herself to say another word on the topic. Back home again, she found herself positively indignant with her favorite brother, and her indignation spread rapidly to all gentlemen of his age and class. It struck her now that they were apt to show a throat-clearing (half belching, really), skin-scratching indifference to all the necessary order of a moral society, that they liked to retreat after dinner to their dark libraries and drink whiskey and brandy out of decanters and tell off-color stories, leaving the drawing room and the ladies and civilization itself to fend for themselves.

    At the annual fair held for the benefit of the church in the gymnasium of the Plaza Settlement House Jane had her final confirmation of the threat that she had envisaged to Gordon's soul. She found him, as she feared, seated complacently by the booth at which Mrs. Bullock was rather languidly trying to sell kitchen pots and pans.
    "Do you think I could deprive you of Mr. Muir's company for a minute, Mrs. Bullock? There is something I should very much like to ask him."
    The pastor's wife's large black eyes met hers with a serene stare behind which Jane, with a sudden jump of her heart, was startled to flare a bold hostility. "Can't you ask him in front of me?"
    "I don't know," Jane mumbled, much taken aback. "I don't really think I can."
    "Then you have secrets with Mr. Muir?"
    "No, not secrets exactly..."
    "What then?"
    "Just ... just things I can't say in public."
    "Am I public? Dear me, what abysses!"
    "We have business to discuss," Jane exclaimed, grasping for anything.
    "Ah, business." Mrs. Bullock threw up her hands. "When I left Virginia my daddy told me to expect everything up here to give way to business."
    "Not quite everything, Ellie," Gordon put in.
    "Yes, everything!" she retorted, almost angrily. "I leave you to Miss Lyle. Shoo! Off with you!"
    Jane and Gordon walked to a bench by a wall of the great chamber, apart from the din of the booths. There he indicated that she should take a seat.
    "Will this do for our 'business,' Aune Jane?" he asked with a smile.
    "Very nicely, thank you. I'm sorry to take you away from your friend, but I have been terribly worried about what you told me of your never marrying. It seemed to me that you might be giving up some happiness on this earth in favor of an imaginary union in the hereafter. Is that really wise, Gordon?"
    He did not seem to feel her interest in the least intrusive or the subject an odd one to be discussed by a young man and an old maid at a church fair. "You misunderstood me. I'm not giving up anything on this earth."
    "But I mean," she continued, very much perplexed, "if you had formed an attachment for, say, a lady, who was ... well, not free..." Her voice trailed off. She could not cope with the topic.
    "She and I could still have our friendship, couldn't we?"
    "You mean what they call a 'platonic' one?"
    "Call it what you like. I believe we shouldn't be so afraid of our bodies. I believe that is something that is wrong with our culture. We would not have been given desires if desires were evil."
    "But you know what our Lord said. That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her—"
    "Yes, yes, but he meant the man who
intended
to commit adultery. Not the man who feels a desire but will not give in to it. All that condemnation of what we cannot help feeling is Jansenism or Puritanism, a survival of Old Testament Hebraic hatred