They made painful reading. What degrees of heart-wretchedness came and
went or stayed with them, we may have over--we may have underestimated.
God knows. In two months Mrs. Fontenette grew visibly older and less
pretty, yet more nearly beautiful; while he, by every sign, was gradually
awakening back--or, shall we not say, being now first born?--to life,
through the pangs of a torn mind; mind, not conscience; but pangs never of
sated, always of the famished sort.
XII
It was he who finally put the very seal of confirmation upon both our
hopes and our fears.
The time was the evening of the same Sunday in whose afternoon his wife
had declined those transparent spelling-lessons. A certain preacher, noted
for his boldness, was drawing crowds by a series of sermons on the text
"Be thou clean," and our fat neighbor and his wife took us, all six, to
hear him. Their pew was well to the front and we were late, so that going
down the aisle unushered, with them in the lead--husband and spouse,
husband and spouse, four couples--we made a procession which became
embarrassingly amusing as the preacher simultaneously closed the Scripture
lesson with, "And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons'
wives with him into the ark.
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