I Forbid the Banns! — page 310: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

300 ‘T FORBID THE BANNS!” of the footlights. These Free Lovers, as they called themselves, were, she perceived, only a more vulgar devel- opment of the essentially vulgar spiritualists. The spirit- ualists, she knew, were people who were devoid in all their thoughts of everything that was spiritual. So these Free Lovers were devoid of any true idea of love. Great Heavens! how the world has fallen away from the poetry of paganism ! This was the girl’s feeling as she heard these sorry jigurantes raising their hands and their eyebrows as they talked, in the low tones one instinctively adopts in telling a child a ghost story, about their affinities, conjuring up pictures that were meant to be sublime, but that smelt of the nursery. The pagan poets could do better than that. Their spirits were spiritual. They did not suggest a night- light that had been kept in a damp cupboard. Bertha turned with relief to the theology which entered into the daily life of paganism. ‘‘‘Suckled in a creed out- worn, ”’ she cried. ‘‘‘A creed outworn,’ while the creeds that remain find such exponents as those creatures, with their jargon of affinities and spiritism, and theosophy, caring as little as their audiences what the words mean !”’ She knew they were not in earnest. They believed only in snug homes, following the marriage ceremony in a church. They were not in earnest, and the people who listened to them were not in earnest. “What does it matter?” cried Julian. ‘* People here haven’t time to be in earnest. They don’t want to be in earnest. They want to be entertained, and these Free Lovers are supposed to be entertaining.”’ “They are little better than impostors,”’ said Bertha. “Impostors? Why, they do not deceive even them- selves,” said he. “They cause people to treat with levity and ridicule a matter which is the most sacred that anyone can (COMME OOO KS (G(0)