Page:My Dear Cornelia (1924).pdf/283

 Cornelia looked at me gravely. "You are jesting," she said. "Please don't. I am in earnest. When I step into our little church, I say to myself, 'Cornelia, what you really care for is safe here. You don't need to worry because other people don't agree with you, and don't value what you value.' And then the final responsibility, for everything, seems to slip so blissfully from my shoulders, and to be accepted by a Power so much stronger and surer than myself, that sometimes I envy the white-cowled peaceful-faced women who have gone into the Church and closed the door behind them."

"You would have to leave Dorothy and Oliver behind you," I said, "if you did that; and they are worth saving, too. My dear Cornelia, I am afraid this 'blessed mood' is a little dangerous to you, and very dangerous to the rest of us. Don't wrap it too closely around you. I knew a woman once who never gave her husband any occasion for anxiety about any other man, but she fell so much in love with her clothes that she became inaccessible to him, and finally made him frantically jealous—jealous of her necklace and of her gowns."

"Do you think I am really like that?"