But one pagan marred this chastened Sabbath harmony of preparation.  In the little house Dave Cowan lolled lordly in a disordered bed, smoked his calabash pipe beside a disordered breakfast tray, fetched him by the Wilbur twin, and luxuriated in the merely Sunday—­and not Sabbath—­edition of a city paper shrieking with black headlines and spectacular with coloured pictures; a pleasing record of crimes and disasters and secrets of the boudoir, the festal diversions of the opulent, the minor secrets of astronomy, woman’s attire, baseball, high art, and facial creams.  As a high priest of the most liberal of all arts, Dave scanned the noisy pages with a cynical and professional eye, knowing that none of the stuff had acquired any dignity or power to coerce human belief until mere typesetters like himself had crystallized it.  Not for Dave Cowan was the printed word of sacred authority.  He had set up too much copy.  But he was pleased, nevertheless, thus to while and doze away a beautiful Sabbath morning that other people made rather a trial of.

Having finished the last of the judge’s shoes, the Wilbur twin took them and the shoes of Merle to their owners, then hastened with his own to the little house where he must dress in his own Sunday clothes, wash his hands with due care—­they would be doubtingly inspected by Winona—­and put soap on his hair to make it lie down.  Merle’s hair would lie politely as combed, but his own hair owned no master but soap.  Lacking this, it stood out and up in wicked disorder—­like the hair of a rowdy, Winona said.

The rebellious stuff was at last plastered deceitfully to his skull as if a mere brush had smoothed it, and with a final survey, to assure himself that he had forgotten none of those niceties of the toilet that Winona would insist upon, he took his new straw hat and went again to the Penniman house.  For the moment he was in flawless order, as neat, as compactly and accurately accoutred as the Merle twin, to whom this effect came without effort.  But it would be so only for a few fleeting moments.  He mournfully knew this, and so did Winona.  Within five blocks from home and still five blocks from the edifice of worship, while Merle appeared as one born to Sunday clothes and shined shoes and a new hat, the Wilbur twin would be one to whom Sabbath finery was exotic and unwelcome.  The flawless lustre of his shoes would be dulled, even though he walked sedately the safe sidewalk; his broad collar and blue polka-dotted cravat would be awry, one stocking would be down, his jacket yawning, all his magnificence seeming unconquerably alien.  Winona did him the justice to recognize that this disarray was due to no wilfulness of its victim.  He was helpless against a malign current of his being.

He held himself stiff in the parlour until the Pennimans came rustling down the stairway.  He could exult in a long look at the benignant lion back of real bars, but, of course, he could not now reach up to touch the bars.  It would do something to his clothes, even if the watchful and upright Merle had not been there to report a transgression of the rules.  Merle also stood waiting, his hat nicely in one hand.