Then there was David, who danced at the head of the procession “girded with a linen ephod,” which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed, it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David’s wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him “leaping and dancing before the Lord,” uncovered save for the presumably inadequate ephod of linen.  She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of David’s years and honour should “make himself ridiculous that way.”

So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it behooves those to walk who shall taste death.  And to the littler boy, prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the big house itself would at times be more than itself to him.  There was the Front Room.  Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in which he was accustomed to regard it.  Each Friday, when it was opened for a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold of its door.  It seemed to be an abode of dead joys—­a place where they had gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival.  And while he could not see God there, actually, neither in the horse-hair sofa nor the bleak melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from the ceiling—­yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb—­an all-pervading thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and part of everything, even of himself when he looked in.  And this quality or spirit he conceived to be God—­the more as it came to him in a flash of divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark of the Covenant.

Thus the Front Room became what “Heaven” meant to him when he heard the word—­a place difficult of access, to be prized not so much for what it actually afforded as for what it enabled one to avoid; a place whose very joys, indeed, would fill with dismay any but the absolutely pure in heart; a place of restricted area, moreover, while all outside was a speciously pleasant hell, teeming with every potent solicitation of evil, of games and sweets and joyous idleness.

The word “God,” then, became at this time a word of evil import to the littler boy, as sinister as the rustle of black silk on a Sabbath morning, when he must walk sedately to church with his hand in Clytie’s, with scarce an envious glance at the proud, happy loafers, who, clean-shaven and in their own Sabbath finery, sat on the big boxes in front of the shut stores and whittled and laughed and gossiped rarely, like very princes.

To Clytie he once said, of something for which he was about to ask her permission, “Oh, it must be awful, awful wicked—­because I want to do it very, very much!—­not like, going to church.”