“He’s gone upstairs so tired that he can barely hist his foot,” replied Sarah.  “You’d better let that Bible class alone this evening, Judy.  Yo’ salvation ain’t dependin’ on it, I reckon.”

But in Judy’s colourless body there dwelt, unknown to Nature, which has no sense of the ridiculous, the soul of a Cleopatra.  At the moment she would cheerfully have died of an asp sooner than relinquish the study of Exodus under the eyes of the rector.  In the arid stretch of her existence a great passion had flamed, and like most great passions, it was ruthless, destroying, and utterly selfish.  She had made butter all day with the hope of that Bible class in her mind, and she was determined that, whatever it cost the Revercombs, she should have her reward this evening in the commendation of the young clergyman.  That mere thunder and lightning should keep her from his side appeared to her little less than absurd.  She knew that he had received a call within the week, and she would have walked unshod over burning ploughshares in order to hear him say that he had declined it.

“I’ve got to go,” she insisted stubbornly.  “If there isn’t anybody to go with me, I’ll go alone.”

“Why, if you’re so bent on it I’ll take you myself,” said Abel, looking up from the barrel of his gun, which he was cleaning.  His manner to Judy was invariably kind and even solicitous, to a degree which caused Sarah to tell herself at times that “it wasn’t natural an’ wasn’t goin’ to last.”  As long as men would behave themselves quietly, and go about their business with the unfailing regularity of the orthodox, she preferred, on the whole, that they should avoid any unusual demonstration of virtue.  An extreme of conduct whether good or bad made her uneasy.  She didn’t like, as she put it in her mind, “anything out of the way.”  Once when Abel, nettled by some whim of Judy’s, had retorted with a slight show of annoyance, his mother had experienced a positive sensation of relief, while she said to herself with a kind of triumph that “the old Adam was thar still.”

“You’ve got that hackin’ cough, Abel an’ you oughtn’t to go out in this storm,” remarked Sarah, with an uneasiness she could not conceal.

“Oh, it won’t hurt me.  I’m a pine knot.  Are you ready, Judy?”

“It’s such a little way,” said Judy, still sullen under her mother-in-law’s disapproval.  When Abel coughed once, while he was getting into his rubber coat, she glanced at him angrily.  Why couldn’t he have waited at least until he got out of doors?  Instead of gratitude she bore him a dull resentment for having married her, and when she looked back on her hard life in her father’s house, she beheld it through that rosy veil of idealism in which the imaginative temperament envelops the past or the future at the cost of the present.  Then she had had time, at least, to dream and to dawdle!  During the seven months of her marriage, she had learned that for the brooding soul there is no anodyne so soothing as neglect, no comfort so grateful as freedom to be unhappy.