ay out of the difficulty before Sally, puzzled, looked at her with:
"Better than when? I've known him longer than you have, mother." For
Sally always boasted of her earlier acquaintance.

"No _when_ at all, kitten! How much better he is when we are alone!
He never flares up then--that's what I meant." But she knew quite well
that her sentence, if finished, would have stood, "how much better he
is than he used to be!" She was too candid a witness in the court of
her own conscience to make any pretence that this wasn't a lie. Of
course it was; but if she never had to tell a worse one than that for
Sally's sake, she would be fortunate indeed.

She was much more happy in the court of her conscience than she was in
that of St. Satisfax--if we may ascribe a judicial status to him, to
help us through with our analysis of her frame of mind. His was a court
which, if not identical at all points with the analogous exponents of
things Divine in her youth, was fraught with the same jurisdiction;
was vocal with resonances that proclaimed the same consequences to the
unredeemed that the mumblings of a pastor of her early days, remembered
with little gratitude, had been inarticulate with. Her babyhood had
received the idea that liars would be sent unequivocally to hell, and
her maturity could not get rid of it. Outside the precinct of the
saint, the brief working morality that considers other folk first was
enough for her; within it, the theologism of an offended deity still
held a traditional sway. Outside, her whole soul recoiled from the idea
of her child knowing a story that would eat into her heart like a
cancer; within, a reserve-corner of that soul, inoculated when it was
new and susceptible, shuddered at her unselfish adhesion to the only
means by which that child could be kept in ignorance.

However, she was clear about one thing. She would apologize in prayer;
but she would go to hell rather than have Sally made miserable. Thus it
came about that Mrs. Fenwick continued a very devout church-goer, and,
as her husband never left her side when he had a choice, he, too,
became a frequent guest of St. Satisfax, whom he seemed to regard as
a harmless though fantastic person who lived in some century or other,
only you always forgot which.

His familiarity with the usages of the reformed St. Satisfax, and his
power of discriminating the lapses of that saint towards the vices
of his early unregenerate days--he being all the while