Then there was the Service itself. Amory had just read the Service again for the first time for a number of years, and really the claims it made could only be described as stupendous!... How could you _possibly_ know that you were going to honour somebody until death did you depart? Suppose they turned out to be a different kind of person altogether from what you had supposed? Surely, then, it would be your clear duty, as an open-minded person, not to honour them! And how could you _possibly_ know that you might not be doing a quite criminally improvident thing in promising to endow somebody, as to whose real character you were totally in the dark, with all your worldly goods? Of course, the sensible view was that that person should be endowed with the worldly goods who was best capable of looking after them. And how could you _possibly_ know that you would cleave to one only, and so on? Not that anybody else was likely to take Aunt Jerry away from Mr. Massey, but suppose they _did_ want to? Amory called that stultifying. It was not open-minded: it was a wilful and deliberate shutting of your mind, perhaps to some really wonderful revelation.... And what had Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac and Rebecca, and all these dead-and-gone Jews got to do with it all? Pretty records some of _them_ had for that matter!... Oh no, the whole thing was simply fossilized. Strictly speaking, it ought to be looked on paleontologically, as a curious and interesting historic survival. For that matter, people seemed to have their doubts even in going into it, for they usually talked about "the silken cord of Love" in an apologetic sort of way--silken cord, indeed, with all those cast-iron regulations! Amory liked "silken cord!"... Oh no; the Service started out all right; it hit the nail on the head with "First it was ordained," and so on, but the rest, eugenically speaking, was mere--mere---- "Obscurantism," Cosimo suggested, but rather diffidently. Even he had never seen Amory so astonishingly into her stride before. He could have listened to her all day; he did listen to her half the day.