With a swift effort she could take the whole library with all its wisdom into her heart, a swift ecstasy. She would think of Mome as she worked indoors, a consolation. Or she would think of Mome again as she hurried across the pasture among the low weeds, going to gather blackberries on the hill. The sudden appearance of a tender little sickle moon up in the western sky—and Mome. A report of a thief, an adventurer, a disaster, a bold deed, a shame, a carnival, and, enhanced, it enriched itself in Mome, it grew there to heroic proportions. Turning swiftly in at the small gate, returning from the well, the day being slow, a duplicate of days past, when the street was hot and fly-ridden and the trash from the stores littered the roadway, she could hang her head far to one side and look down the street toward the court-house and the jail and see a street in Mome where marble causeways ran up to marble stairs and tall white walls gave out onto high balconies, cool and fresh in a sweet wind, the people eager and exact and clear, intent with being. In Mome there was nothing commonplace and dreary. There time never waited upon a fly-blown afternoon. Quick sayings flashed on the lips of men there, true finalities or bright quips—jests with the sudden tilt of quicksilver. * * * * * The people came to the church on Sundays wearing rustling clothes, some of them riding in carriages that were harnessed to plow horses or to driving nags or gay well-bred roadsters. In the church the ladies taught lessons of the regeneration of the elect and the death in Adam, all men born in a state of sin, of Eve who had eaten the fruit and had given of it to Adam, that what God did foreknow that he did ordain. The words would be confused with drowsiness and weariness, and the foreknowledge of God would settle to the odors of the yarn carpet and the dry melancholy of the village Sabbath, sin being any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God. A savory wooden tray would be passed about for the collection, a tray smelling of rich cedar wood and varnish. The savor of the tray being passed and done, the lady would draw the mind back again to the hard matter of Eden and sin, to the fearful definition which was heavy with meaningless wordings. Was it for this, these laborings with odorless words and long unregenerated sayings, that she, Luce Jarvis, that she, Theodosia Bell, had put on her new white dress and her silk sash? It was an impenetrable matter. The foreknowledge arose from the carpet in an aromatic stench, but the desire to cough would not follow. There was no relief. Want-of-conformity-to took Transgression-of into a great stale book and closed flat the covers, and in Adam all men were born in a state of sin. Eve was a woman and a terrible instigator of Want-of-conformity-to. The lady teacher was severe upon Eve. But Adam, said the lady, was equal with her in guilt.