a good one.

Yet the old settlers of Harvey felt instinctively that the price of
their Judge's bargain was not so trifling a matter as at first the happy
couple had esteemed it. The older people saw the big house glow with
light as the town spread over the hill and prosperity blackened the
Valley. The older people played their quiet games of bridge, by night,
and said little. Judge Van Dorn polished the periods of his orations,
kept himself like a race horse, strutted like a gobbler, showed his
naked mouth, held himself always tightly in hand, kept his eye out for a
pretty face, wherever it might be found, drank a little too much at
night at the City Club; not much too much but a very little too much--so
much that he needed something to brighten his eyes in the morning.

But whatever the Judge's views were on the chess game of the cosmos,
Margaret, his wife, had no desire to beat God at his own game. She was a
seeker, who always was looking for a new God. God after God had passed
in weary review before her. She was always ready to tune up with the
infinite, and to ignore the past--a most comfortable thing to do under
the circumstances.

As she turned into Market Street one February morning of the New Year in
the New Century, leading her dachshund, she was revolving a deep problem
in her head. She was trying to get enough faith to believe that her
complexion did not need a renovation. She knew that the skin-thought she
kept holding was earth-bound and she had tried to shake it, but it
wouldn't shake. She had progressed far enough in the moment's cult to
overcome a food-thought when her stomach hurt her, by playing a stiff
game of bridge for a little stake. But the skin-thought was with her,
and she was nervous and irritable and upon the verge of tears for
nothing at all. Moreover, her dog kept pulling at his leash, so
altogether her cup was running over and she went into Mr. Brotherton's
store to ask him to try to find an English translation of a highly
improper German book with a pious title about which she had heard from a
woman from Chicago who had been visiting her.

Now Mr. Brotherton had felt the impulse of the town's prosperity in his
business. The cigar stand was gone. In its place was a handsome plain
glass case containing expensive books--books bound in vellum, books in
hand-tooled leather, books with wide, ragged margins of heavy linen
paper around deep black types with illuminated initials at the chapter