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 are at prayer and the pine trees swing their shadows over the graves in Redwine churchyard. But here in New York it is merely the day when you change your occupations and amusements. Still, there is preaching for those who are not drunk, or asleep, or in the parks, or at Coney Island, or giving week-end parties at their country places, or planning the millennium without God along socialistic scantlings of thought and barb-wire theories of the brotherhood of man. And I went with the girls to a fashionable church. And this is how the morals in me that William planted came to take offense, and how I reached the conclusion that I had best go back home, where life is indeed made too hard for the spirit, but where at least one may be decently conscious of having one according to the Scriptures.