as conscious of a great
emptiness where her scheme for the salvation of Archelaus had been
waxing.
Annie had about as much true moral sense as a cat. Her quarrel with
Archelaus was not that, in a wayside copse, with some girl, Jennifer or
another, he was learning as fact what he had long known in theory; the
chastity of a man, even of her beloved son, meant very little to her.
Terrible things, far worse than the casual mating of a man and a maid,
happen in the country, and it needed something keenly sharpened to make
Annie's dulled sensitiveness feel a shock. She raged that her son was
taken from her, but she would have felt indignant anger if the girl had
denied her lovely boy. And behind her sense of loss in Archelaus, behind
her terror that he was being led in the way of destruction, there
lurked, unknown to her, another anger, an anger against life. Some last
remnant of femininity cried out because for her it was all over--gone
the shudderings and the fierce delights.... Suddenly she felt intensely
old, and she collapsed from her kneeling attitude on to her heels and
sat there slackly. Youth is so confident that it can never grow old, and
then one day unthinking middle age awakens and finds that it has become
so.
Then stirred in Annie the outraged feeling of a parent, which says that
it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel passion.
It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible
in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning
to work out in her children. She supposed vaguely, confronted by the
fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like
that about other people, but differently about themselves.
Broad daylight had seen Archelaus return, but by then Annie had fallen
into a heavy sleep and did not hear his entry, though there was nothing
furtive about it; rather was it the unashamed clatter of the master. She
awoke to deadness of all feeling except the thought of the revival that
was to sweep like a flail over the land, and in her tired but avid mind
that winnowing began to assume the proportions of the chief thing for
which to live. She saw herself in it, and with her, by a flash of
inspiration, not the fair eldest-born who had failed her, but the
youngest--he whom she could flaunt in the face of God and men. Some
receptacle for passion Annie had to have, and being an uneducated woman,
it had to be a personal one. Arc
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