Christian fiction; Circuit riders -- Fiction; Domestic fiction; Spouses of clergy -- Fiction
William's greatest limitation as a minister was his firm conviction
that the world was a drawback to Heaven. He fought it and abused it to
the last, as if God had not made it and designed it to furnish
properly-chastened material for His higher Kingdom. And somehow, as I
wept and talked down to him in his dust I felt wonderfully like the
young woman that had loved him and feared him during those first
rebellious years when I was still so much the Episcopalian and so
little the Methodist.
The next day I sent a letter to my sister Sarah, a widow living with
her two grown daughters in New York. For years I had kept up no
relations with my own family. They were of the world, prosperous, and
I felt that they could not understand William nor the soul-steepling
way we lived. But now I was writing to accept the invitation Sarah
sent me just after William's death, to make my home with her.
A week later I packed my things, borrowed my church letter, locked my
door and took the train at Royden for New York. I told the neighbors I
was going for a visit to New York, but really I was on my way to find
the world again. And I found it. You cannot find anything else in New
York.
Sarah and the girls met me at the Grand Central Station and they spent
more kisses welcoming me than I had received since my bridal days.
Sarah is two years older than I am, but she looks ten years younger,
and there is not the mark of a prayer on her smooth face, while I feel
as if I might have the doxology stamped in wrinkles above my eyebrows.
Everything is different from the way it is at home. We do not have
dinner till supper-time, and there is no mantel or fireplace in my
room, although the furniture is grander than anything I ever saw. I
set William's photograph on the dresser, and I can tell by the way he
looks at me all day long that he would not approve of the way I am
carrying on. But I cannot help it; I must have a little spell of world
life. That other in which I qualified with him for Heaven was too
stretching to something in me that grew mortally tired of stretching.
I have set myself with all diligence to enjoy the things of this world
in the time that's left me. The more I think of it the more nearly
certain I am that they were meant for us.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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