row for the little house
between the hills on the Redwine Circuit. This resolution is not in
keeping with some views and sentiments I have written in these pages,
but, being a woman, I thank God I can be as inconsistent as is
necessary to feminine peace of mind. I reckon I'll never be satisfied
now in the world or in the church without William. I can't seem to
settle into any state of being of my own. I am not saying that I have
not had a good time here, but, after all, I do not belong with the
people of the world, either.

Since I have been with Sarah I have had constantly to resist the
temptation to speak to her about her soul, just from force of habit. I
have never seen, in all my years with William, a woman of her age so
youthfully, cheerfully unconscious of having a soul. And that is not
the worst of it: I can feel the moral elbows of mine sticking out in
every conversation, as if Heaven had made all my thoughts angular. It
is a sort of horned integrity that grows up in a woman who follows the
Gospel flag of the Methodist itinerancy. I am sure it is often
embarrassing to Sarah and the girls, especially when they have
company--not the kind of company William and I had, thinly-bred
missionaries, and Bible pedlers, and tramps, and beggars, and
occasionally, toward the last a little, sweet-faced, pod-headed
deaconess--but Lilith ladies and one or two that William would call
Delilahs, and handsome, sleek, intellectual men who appeared to be as
ignorant of God as I am of natural history. I am not saying that they
are not decent people, but they are not all there. I miss something
out of them. If they have ever had souls they have had them removed,
probably by a kind of reasoning surgery quite as effective as the
literal surgery with which so many of them have their poor appendixes
removed.

I have told Sarah, and while she expresses regret I am sure she feels
relieved. It is straining to have a person in the family who belongs
to a different spiritual species. And now I have just finished packing
my things. I am thankful I told the neighbors that I was going on a
visit. I came suddenly to the conclusion to-day that it was only a
visit because of a thing that happened. I have not been offended
morally by anything I have seen in the theaters or other places of
amusement, but I have had conscientious scruples about the churches
here!

This would be the Sabbath day far away in the country, where the hills