“I am not sure,” Madge said, “that it is dreadful.”

She hastened to redeem herself from any possible charge of bloodthirstiness.

“I don’t mean,” she said, “that it isn’t awful for a man to lose his leg.  But men who go through a thing like that and come out—­conquerors—­are rather wonderful, Mrs. Flippin.”

Madge had hold of Mrs. Flippin’s hand.  She often held it in this quiet hour, and the idea rather amused her.  She was not demonstrative, and it seemed inconceivable that she should care to hold Mrs. Flippins’ hand.  But there was a motherliness about Mrs. Flippin, a quality with which Madge had never before come closely in contact.  “It is like the way I used to feel when I was a little girl and said my prayers at night,” she told herself.

Madge did not say her prayers now.  Nobody did, apparently.  She thought it rather a pity.  It was a comfortable thing to do.  And it meant a great deal if you only believed in it.

“Do you say your prayers, Mrs. Flippin?” she asked suddenly.

Mrs. Flippin was getting used to Madge’s queer questions.  She treated them as a missionary might treat the questions of a beautiful and appealing savage, who having gone with him to some strange country was constantly interrogatory.

“She don’t seem to know anything about the things we do,” Mrs. Flippin told her husband.  “She got the nurse to wheel her out into the kitchen this afternoon, and watched me frost a cake and cut out biscuits.  And she says that she has never seen anything so sociable as the teakettle, the way it rocks and sings.”

So now when Madge asked Mrs. Flippin if she said her prayers, Mrs. Flippin said, “Do you mean at night?”

“Yes.”

“Bob and I say them together,” said Mrs. Flippin.  “We started on our wedding night, and we ain’t ever stopped.”

It was a simple statement of a sublime fact.  For thirty years this plain man and this plain woman had kept alive the spiritual flame on the household altar.  No wonder that peace was under this roof and serenity.

Madge, as she lay there holding Mrs. Flippin’s hand, looked very young, almost like a little girl.  Her hair was parted and the burnished braids lay heavy on her lovely neck.  Her thin fine gown left her arms bare.  “Mrs. Flippin,” she said, “I wish I could live here always, and have you come every night and sit and hold my hand.”

Her eyes were smiling and Mrs. Flippin smiled back.  “You’d get tired.”

“No,” said Madge, “I don’t believe anybody ever gets tired of goodness.  Not real goodness.  The kind that isn’t hypocritical or priggish.  And in these days it is so rare, that one just loves it.  I am bored to death with near-bad people, Mrs. Flippin, and near-good ones.  I’d much rather have them real saints and real sinners.”