His thoughts came to him quickly, his brain had been clarified by that
sleep, horrible though it had been. He thought steadily now, the facts all
arranged before him. His wife had told him, almost with vindictive pride,
that she had been guilty of adultery. He did not at present think of
Morris at all.
To him adultery was an awful, a terrible sin. He himself had been
physically faithful to his wife, although he had perhaps never, in the
true sense of the word, loved her. Because he had been a man of splendid
physique and great animal spirits he had, of course, and especially in his
earlier days, known what physical temptation was, but the extreme
preoccupation of his time with every kind of business had saved him from
that acutest lure that idleness brings. Nevertheless, it may confidently
be said that, had temptation been of the sharpest and the most
aggravating, he would never have, even for a moment, dwelt upon the
possibility of yielding to it. To him this was the "sin against the Holy
Ghost."
He had not indeed the purity of the Saint to whom these sins are simply
not realisable; he had the confidence of one who had made his vows to God
and, having made them, could not conceive that they should be broken.
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