She had been an undisciplined girl, called a tomboy in those days, whose farmer forbears had given to her a pagan passion for the soil and the open sky.  Although brought up with a rigid training in theology, religion had never meant more to her than a certainty of hell as a punishment for misdeeds which neither she nor any of the valley people were likely to commit—­murder, suicide, false swearing, and the like.  Of definite religious feeling, she had none, although the discipline of a hard if happy life had brought her spiritual life in an unconsciously profound form.  She had shrunk from that discipline with all the force of her nature, and in her girl’s heart had vowed that she would never marry and lead the slave’s life of a New England farmer’s wife.  But then had arrived Nathaniel, the big, handsome lad who had taken her wild, shy heart and lost his own when they first met.

So, half rebellious, she had begun the life of a wife in the old house from which her mother had just gone to the churchyard next door, and which was yet filled with her brave and gentle spirit.  The old woman, looking miserably about her, remembered how at every crisis of her life the old house had spoken to her of the line of submissive wives and mothers which lay back of her, and had tamed her to a happy resignation in the common fate of women.  On her mother’s bed she had borne the agony of childbirth without a murmur, she whose strong young body had never known pain of any kind.  She had been a joyful prisoner to her little children, she who had always roamed so foot-free in her girlhood, and with a patience inspired by the thought of her place in the pilgrimage of her race, she had turned the great strength of her love for her husband toward a contented acceptance of the narrow life which was all he could give her.

Each smallest detail in the room had a significance running back over years.  The ragged cuts in the window-sill moved her to a sudden recollection of how naughty little Hiram had cut them with his first knife.  With what a repressed intensity she had loved the child while she had reproved him!  How could she go away and leave every reminder of her children!  With a quick and characteristic turn she caught herself in the flagrant contradiction involved in her reluctance to leave behind her mere senseless reminders of her son when she was going to his actual self.  And then, with the despairing clear sight of one in a crisis of life, she knew that, in very fact, Hiram was no longer the boy who had left them years ago.  Away from all that made up her life, under influences utterly foreign and alien, he had spent almost twice as many years as he had with her.  Not only had the reaction from his severe training carried him to another extreme of laxness, but as result of his continued absence he had lost all contact with her world.  He no longer consciously repudiated it, he had crossed the deeper gulf of forgetting it.  He was a stranger to her.