About a week before my wedding we were sitting together at the close of the afternoon; my mother had taken up her knitting, as her habit was when the light failed. Something in the work we had been doing, putting the last touches to my wedding dress, led her to speak of her own, and of my father as a young man. The mention pricked me to notice what I recall now as characteristic of Taylorville women, that, with all she had been through, the war, her eight children, so many graves, there was still in her attitude, toward all these, a kind of untutored virginity. It made, my noticing it then and being touched by it, a sort of bridge by which it seemed for the moment she might be drawn over to my side. On the impulse I spoke. "Mother," I said, "I want to know?..." It seemed a natural sort of knowledge to which any woman had a right. Almost before the question was out I saw the expression of offended shock come over my mother's reminiscent softness, the nearly animal rage of terror with which the unknown, the unaccustomed, assailed her. "Olivia! Olivia!" She stood up, her knitting rigid in her hands, the ball of it speeding away in the dusk of the floor on some private terror of its own. "Olivia, I'll not hear of such things! You are not to speak of them, do you understand! I'll have nothing to do with them!" "I wanted to know," I said. "I thought you could tell me...." I went over and stood by the window; a little dry snow was blowing--it was the first week in November--beginning to collect on the edges of the walks and along the fences; the landscape showed sketched in white on a background of neutral gray. I heard a movement in the room behind me; my mother came presently and stood looking out with me. She was very pale, scared but commiserating. Somehow my question had glanced in striking the dying nerve of long since encountered dreads and pains. We faced them together there in the cold twilight. "I'm sorry, daughter"--she hesitated--"I can't help you. I don't know ... I never knew myself." CHAPTER II It is no doubt owing to the habit of life in Higgleston being so little differentiated from Taylorville that I was never able to get any other impression of it than as a place one put up at on the way to some other; always it bore to my mind the air of a traveller's room in one of those stops where it is necessary to open the trunks but not worth while to unpack them. Nor do I think it was altogether owing to what I left there that my recollection of it centres paganly about the cemetery. In Taylorville, love and birth, though but scantily removed from the savour of impropriety, were still the salient facts of existence, but in Higgleston a funeral was your real human occasion. It was as if the rural fear of innovation had thrown them back for a pivotal centre upon the point of continuity with their past.