They met or passed other family groups, stiffly armoured for the weekly penance to a bewildering puzzle of mortality.  Ceremonious greetings were exchanged with these.  The day was bright and the world all fair, but there could be no levity, no social small talk, while this grim business was on.  They reached the white house of worship, impressive under its heaven-pointing steeple, and passed within its portals, stepping softly to the accompaniment of those silken whisperings, with now and again the high squeak of new boots whose wearers, profaning the stillness, would appear self-conscious and annoyed, though as if silently protesting that they were blameless.

Thus began an hour of acute mental distress for the Wilbur twin.  He sat tightly between Mrs. Penniman and the judge.  There was no free movement possible.  He couldn’t even juggle one foot backward and forward without correction.  The nervous energy thus suppressed rushed to all the surface of his body and made his skin tingle maddeningly.  He felt each hair on his head as it broke away from the confining soap.  Something was inside his collar, and he couldn’t reach for it; there was a poignant itching between his shoulder blades, and this could receive no proper treatment.  He boiled with dumb, helpless rage, having to fight this wicked unrest.  He never doubted its wickedness, and considered himself forever shut out from those rewards that would fall to the righteous who loved church and could sit still there without jiggling or writhing or twisting or scratching.

He was a little diverted from his tortures by the arrival of the Whipples.  From the Penniman pew he could glance across to a side pew and observe a line of repeated Whipple noses, upon which for some moments he was enabled to speculate forgetfully.  Once—­years ago, it seemed to him—­he had heard talk of the Whipple nose.  This one had the Whipple nose, or that one did not have the Whipple nose; and it had then been his understanding that the Whipple family possessed but one nose in common; sometimes one Whipple had it; then another Whipple would have it.  At the time this had seemed curious, but in no way anomalous.  He had readily pictured a Whipple nose being worn now by one and now by another of this family.  He had visualized it as something that could be handed about.  Later had come the disappointing realization that each Whipple had a complete nose at all times for his very own; that the phrase by which he had been misled denoted merely the possession of a certain build of nose by Whipples.

But even this simple phenomenon offered some distraction from his present miseries.  He could glance along the line of Whipple noses and observe that they were, indeed, of a markedly similar pattern.  It was, as one might say, a standardized nose, raised by careful selection through past generations of Whipples to the highest point of efficiency; for ages yet to come the demands of environment, howsoever capricious,