When he awoke the afternoon was already far gone.  The clock on the shelf ticked loudly in the still room, the coal stove sent out a warm glow.  The blooming plants in the south bow-window looked brighter and fresher than usual in the soft white light that came up from the snow.  Mrs. Wheeler was reading by the west window, looking away from her book now and then to gaze off at the grey sky and the muffled fields.  The creek made a winding violet chasm down through the pasture, and the trees followed it in a black thicket, curiously tufted with snow.  Claude lay for some time without speaking, watching his mother’s profile against the glass, and thinking how good this soft, clinging snow-fall would be for his wheat fields.

“What are you reading, Mother?” he asked presently.

She turned her head toward him.  “Nothing very new.  I was just beginning ‘Paradise Lost’ again.  I haven’t read it for a long while.”

“Read aloud, won’t you?  Just wherever you happen to be.  I like the sound of it.”

Mrs. Wheeler always read deliberately, giving each syllable its full value.  Her voice, naturally soft and rather wistful, trailed over the long measures and the threatening Biblical names, all familiar to her and full of meaning.

  “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round
  As one great furnace flamed; yet from the flames
  No light, but rather darkness visible
  Served only to discover sights of woe.”

Her voice groped as if she were trying to realize something.  The room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and pictures, so unaccountably glorious.  At last the light failed, and Mrs. Wheeler closed the book.

“That’s fine,” Claude commented from the couch.  “But Milton couldn’t have got along without the wicked, could he?”

Mrs. Wheeler looked up.  “Is that a joke?” she asked slyly.

“Oh no, not at all!  It just struck me that this part is so much more interesting than the books about perfect innocence in Eden.”

“And yet I suppose it shouldn’t be so,” Mrs. Wheeler said slowly, as if in doubt.

Her son laughed and sat up, smoothing his rumpled hair.  “The fact remains that it is, dear Mother.  And if you took all the great sinners out of the Bible, you’d take out all the interesting characters, wouldn’t you?”

“Except Christ,” she murmured.

“Yes, except Christ.  But I suppose the Jews were honest when they thought him the most dangerous kind of criminal.”

“Are you trying to tangle me up?” his mother inquired, with both reproach and amusement in her voice.

Claude went to the window where she was sitting, and looked out at the snowy fields, now becoming blue and desolate as the shadows deepened.  “I only mean that even in the Bible the people who were merely free from blame didn’t amount to much.”