THEODOSIA: You couldn’t blaspheme the human mind, you couldn’t ever. To try to lower yourself by your own bootstraps. It wouldn’t operate, that’s all. You might try ever so hard, but you couldn’t do it. Stumble? Fall over your own boots and stumble, yes, but if you did you’d never know it. What you didn’t know couldn’t happen. SECOND VOICE: Oh talk! Which of the commandments have you not broken? Every last God’s ten of the lot. FIRST VOICE: There ought to be more than ten, ought to be about ten thousand more commandments. One for every nerve-end. THIRD VOICE: A man could keep all ten and still be a writhing devil in hell. SECOND VOICE: The whole thing draws itself inside its own maw, lies down to sleep in its snake’s nest, replete, when it has enough. FIRST VOICE: Yellow hair, Annie, and gentle ways. Loved everybody. The angel whiteness of the grave on her from the first. “How He took little children as lambs to His fold.” The song. THIRD VOICE: Your mother was dark, but this child was fair. Your father’s own child. The one most like your father. Your father’s own, then. THEODOSIA: Oh, God, I believe, and there’s nothing to believe. She thought again and again of the pond below the hill in the creek bottom. The water would be fresh and sweet after the long winter rains and it would stand high along the banks. In the morning someone would find her body there, water-soaked, lying in the clean mud at the bottom of the water, stones tied to her feet. It would be easy to go out the door some night and never come back. Once she had gone out the door the rest would be inevitable, the door having become the line between to go and not to go. The front door seemed necessary, and she could not think tenderly of the morning, of any morning, of the stones that would be tied to her feet. All circumstances were set toward this departure. The days of the week, distantly comprehended, did not differ, one from another; Tuesday or Monday, Friday, all sank into a flat mass and were approached without emotion. She felt her hand as it was folded into the other hand and knew the feel of the bones and their bent articulations and the texture of skin as felt by itself. Prophecy gathered vaguely about the facts which were already well stated. One fact more remained as the act of departure. She slept lightly, her sleep weighted by the act, burdened by it.