illage women were, as a rule, full of piety. Paulina Maria was
austere. She had the spirit to have scourged herself had she once
convicted herself of wrong; but that she had never done. The power of
self-blame was not in her. Paulina Maria had never labored under
conviction of sin; she had had no orthodox conversion; but she set
her slim unswerving feet in the paths of righteousness, and walked
there with her head up. In her the uncompromising spirit of
Puritanism was so strong that it defeated its own ends. The other
women were at times inflexible; Paulina Maria was always rigid. The
others could be severe; Paulina Maria might have conducted an
inquisition. She had in her possibilities of almost mechanical
relentlessness which had never been tested in her simple village
life. Paulina Maria never shirked her duty, but it could not be said
that she performed it in any gentle and Christ-like sense. She rather
attacked it and slew it, as if it were a dragon in her path. That
night she was very weary. She had toiled hard all day at her own
vigorous cleaning. Her bones and muscles ached. The spring languor
also was upon her. She was not a strong woman, but she never dreamed
of refusing to go to Ann Edwards's and assist her in her sad
preparations.

She and Belinda Lamb remained and worked until midnight; then they
went home. Jerome had to escort them through the silent village
street--he had remained up for that purpose. Elmira had been sent to
bed. When the boy came home alone along the familiar road, between
the houses with their windows gleaming with blank darkness in his
eyes, with no sound in his ears save the hoarse bark of a dog when
his footsteps echoed past, a great strangeness of himself in his own
thoughts was upon him.

He had not the feminine ability to ease descent into the depths of
sorrow by catching at all its minor details on the way. He plunged
straight down; no questions of funeral preparations or mourning
bonnets arrested him for a second. "My father is dead," Jerome told
himself; "he jumped into the pond and drowned himself, and here's
mother, and Elmira, and the mortgage, and me."

This poor little _me_ of the village boy seemed suddenly to have
grown in stature, to have bent, as it grew, under a grievous burden,
and to have lost all its childish carelessness and childish ambition.
Jerome saw himself in the likeness of his father, bearing the
mortgage upon his shoulders, and his boyish self never c