“I rolled her all up in my shawl; I guess she won’t ketch cold; it’s thick,” responded the woman, effusively, and William said no more.  He sat with his chin in his hands and his eyes fixed absently.  The fire was smoking over a low, red glow of coals, the chimney-place yawned black before him, the hearth was all strewn with pots and kettles, and the shelf above it was piled high with a vague household litter.  It had leaked around the chimney, and there was a great discolored blotch on the wall above the shelf, and the ceiling.  Two or three hens came pecking around the kettles at William’s feet.

To this young man, brought up in the extreme thrift and neatness of a typical New England household, this strange untidiness, as he viewed it through his strained mental state, seemed to have a deeper significance, and reveal the very shame and squalor of the soul itself, and its own existence and thoughts, by material images.

He might from his own sensations, as he sat there, have been actually translated into a veritable hell, from the utter strangeness of the atmosphere which his thoughts seemed to gasp in.  William had never come fully into the atmosphere of his own sin before, but now he had, and somehow the untidy pots and kettles on the hearth made it more real.  He was conscious as he sat there of very little pity for the girl in the other room, of very little love for her, and also of very little love or pity for himself; he felt nothing but a kind of horror.  He saw suddenly the alien side of life, and the alien side of his own self, which he would always have kept faced out towards space, away from all eyes, like the other side of the moon, and that was for the time all he could grasp.

Once or twice Mrs. Sloane volunteered a remark, but he scarcely responded, and once he heard absently her voice and Rebecca’s in the other room.  Otherwise he sat in utter silence, except for the low chuckle of the hens and the taps of their beaks against the iron pots, until Barney came with the minister and the minister’s wife.

Barney had taken the minister aside, and asked him, stammeringly, if he thought his wife would come.  He could not bear the thought of the Sloane woman’s being a witness at his sister’s wedding.  The minister and his wife were both very young, and had not lived long in Pembroke.  They looked much alike:  the minister’s small, pale, peaked face peered with anxious solicitude between the folds of the great green scarf which he tied over his cap, and his wife looked like him out of her great wadded green silk hood, when they got into the sleigh with Barney.

The minister had had a whispered conference with his wife, and now she never once let her eyes rest on either of the two men as they slid swiftly along over the new snow.  Her heart beat loudly in her ears, her little thin hands were cold in her great muff.  She had married very young, out of a godly New England minister’s home.  She had never known anything like this before, and a sort of general shame of femininity seemed to be upon her.