y, still sullen under her
mother-in-law's disapproval. When Abel coughed once, while he was
getting into his rubber coat, she glanced at him angrily. Why couldn't
he have waited at least until he got out of doors? Instead of gratitude
she bore him a dull resentment for having married her, and when she
looked back on her hard life in her father's house, she beheld it
through that rosy veil of idealism in which the imaginative temperament
envelops the past or the future at the cost of the present. Then she had
had time, at least, to dream and to dawdle! During the seven months of
her marriage, she had learned that for the brooding soul there is no
anodyne so soothing as neglect, no comfort so grateful as freedom to be
unhappy.

When the door closed behind them Sarah looked at Blossom with an
eloquent expression. "Well, I never!" she exclaimed, and wrung the
dough from her hands into the tray over which she was standing. "Well I
never!"

"I don't believe it's right for Abel to give in to Judy as he does,"
said Blossom.

"I never saw a Revercomb that warn't a fool about something," answered
Sarah. "It don't matter so much what 'tis about, but it's obliged to be
about something."

Blossom sighed and bent lower over the seam she was running. She had
long since ceased to draw any consolation from her secret marriage, and
her wedding ring (bought weeks after the ceremony by Gay) caused her
pain rather than pleasure when it pressed into her bosom, where it hung
suspended by a blue ribbon from her neck. Her strong Saxon instinct for
chastity--for the integrity of feminine virtue--sometimes awoke in her,
and then she would think exultingly, "At least I am married!" But even
this amazing triumph of morality--of the spirit of Sarah Revercomb over
the spirit of the elder Jonathan Gay--showed pallid and bloodless
beside the evanescent passion to which she had been sacrificed. Destiny,
working through her temperament, had marked her for victory, but it had
been only one of those brief victories which herald defeats. The
forces of law and order--the sound racial instincts which make for the
preservation of society--these had won in the event, though they had
been, after all, powerless to change the ultimate issue. The spirit of
old Jonathan, as well as the spirit of Sarah, was immortal. The racial
battle between the soldier of fortune and the militant Calvinist was not
yet fought to a finish.

"I believe Abel would give Judy the