t than we do." He believed in the
Christian religion, and never thought about it, he believed in the
church, and seldom went near it; he was shocked by Carol's lack of
faith, and wasn't quite sure what was the nature of the faith that she
lacked.

Carol herself was an uneasy and dodging agnostic.

When she ventured to Sunday School and heard the teachers droning that
the genealogy of Shamsherai was a valuable ethical problem for children
to think about; when she experimented with Wednesday prayer-meeting and
listened to store-keeping elders giving their unvarying weekly testimony
in primitive erotic symbols and such gory Chaldean phrases as "washed
in the blood of the lamb" and "a vengeful God"; when Mrs. Bogart boasted
that through his boyhood she had made Cy confess nightly upon the basis
of the Ten Commandments; then Carol was dismayed to find the Christian
religion, in America, in the twentieth century, as abnormal as
Zoroastrianism--without the splendor. But when she went to church
suppers and felt the friendliness, saw the gaiety with which the sisters
served cold ham and scalloped potatoes; when Mrs. Champ Perry cried to
her, on an afternoon call, "My dear, if you just knew how happy it makes
you to come into abiding grace," then Carol found the humanness behind
the sanguinary and alien theology. Always she perceived that the
churches--Methodist, Baptist, Congregational, Catholic, all of
them--which had seemed so unimportant to the judge's home in her
childhood, so isolated from the city struggle in St. Paul, were
still, in Gopher Prairie, the strongest of the forces compelling
respectability.

This August Sunday she had been tempted by the announcement that the
Reverend Edmund Zitterel would preach on the topic "America, Face Your
Problems!" With the great war, workmen in every nation showing a desire
to control industries, Russia hinting a leftward revolution against
Kerensky, woman suffrage coming, there seemed to be plenty of problems
for the Reverend Mr. Zitterel to call on America to face. Carol gathered
her family and trotted off behind Uncle Whittier.

The congregation faced the heat with informality. Men with highly
plastered hair, so painfully shaved that their faces looked sore,
removed their coats, sighed, and unbuttoned two buttons of their
uncreased Sunday vests. Large-bosomed, white-bloused, hot-necked,
spectacled matrons--the Mothers in Israel, pioneers and friends of Mrs.
Champ Perry--waved