Annie had about as much true moral sense as a cat.  Her quarrel with Archelaus was not that, in a wayside copse, with some girl, Jennifer or another, he was learning as fact what he had long known in theory; the chastity of a man, even of her beloved son, meant very little to her.  Terrible things, far worse than the casual mating of a man and a maid, happen in the country, and it needed something keenly sharpened to make Annie’s dulled sensitiveness feel a shock.  She raged that her son was taken from her, but she would have felt indignant anger if the girl had denied her lovely boy.  And behind her sense of loss in Archelaus, behind her terror that he was being led in the way of destruction, there lurked, unknown to her, another anger, an anger against life.  Some last remnant of femininity cried out because for her it was all over—­gone the shudderings and the fierce delights....  Suddenly she felt intensely old, and she collapsed from her kneeling attitude on to her heels and sat there slackly.  Youth is so confident that it can never grow old, and then one day unthinking middle age awakens and finds that it has become so.

Then stirred in Annie the outraged feeling of a parent, which says that it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel passion.  It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning to work out in her children.  She supposed vaguely, confronted by the fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like that about other people, but differently about themselves.

Broad daylight had seen Archelaus return, but by then Annie had fallen into a heavy sleep and did not hear his entry, though there was nothing furtive about it; rather was it the unashamed clatter of the master.  She awoke to deadness of all feeling except the thought of the revival that was to sweep like a flail over the land, and in her tired but avid mind that winnowing began to assume the proportions of the chief thing for which to live.  She saw herself in it, and with her, by a flash of inspiration, not the fair eldest-born who had failed her, but the youngest—­he whom she could flaunt in the face of God and men.  Some receptacle for passion Annie had to have, and being an uneducated woman, it had to be a personal one.  Archelaus had gone beyond her clutch, Tom she knew would evade her, John-James she, like Ishmael, found unresponsive.  As for girls, she placed them below any male creature.  She loved Vassie far more than she did Ishmael, if she could be said to love him at all, but nevertheless he was a son.  Her punishment for sin might be that those other more dearly loved ones were not to be among the saved, but this child she could shake in the face of the Almighty....

It was by this new passion that Ishmael, with his foolish little plans of a new importance, found himself caught up and held relentlessly.