The Devil's Disciple by George Bernard Shaw

<p>At the most wretched hour between a black night and a wintry morning in the year 1777 Mrs. Dudgeon of New Hampshire is sitting up in the kitchen and general dwelling room of her farm house on the outskirts of the town of Websterbridge. She is not a prepossessing woman.</p><p> </p><p> No woman looks her best after sitting up all night; and Mrs. Dudgeon's face even at its best is grimly trenched by the channels into which the barren forms and observances of a dead Puritanism can pen a bitter temper and a fierce pride.</p><p> </p><p>She is an elderly matron who has worked hard and got nothing by it except dominion and detestation in her sordid home and an unquestioned reputation for piety and respectability among her neighbors to whom drink and debauchery are still so much more tempting than religion and rectitude that they conceive goodness simply as self-denial.</p><p> </p><p>This conception is easily extended to others - denial and finally generalized as covering anything disagreeable. So Mrs. Dudgeon being exceedingly disagreeable is held to be excee-dingly good.</p><p> </p><p>Short of flat felony she enjoys complete license except for amiable weaknesses of any sort and is consequently without knowing it the most licentious woman in the parish on the strength of never having broken the seventh commandment or missed a Sunday at the Presbyterian church.</p><p> </p>