Charlotte Bell’s hands could fly easily over the piano if she were minded to make a tune. Sometimes in the evening old Anthony played his fiddle standing beside her as she played. Her rich white dress had many yards of small lace sewed into it in designs and her hat was off. Her dark hair was laid softly over her head and knotted at the back in a large coil. Luce looked at her and felt her presence reach past the white dress as if there were some large thing inside. Then she laid her bare. She tore away the clothes from around her shoulders and opened her body. She emptied the heart out of it and flung out the entrails, for she had seen men butcher a hog. She went searching down through blood and veins, liver and lights, smelt and kidney. Out came the fat, the guts, the ribs. She was looking for something. Then on beyond, past the flesh, to the bone, she was searching. Past the brains, past the skull bone. She flung everything aside as she took it out and went deeper, eager to find. Past the bones she came to the skin again, on the other side, and finally to the red of the yarn carpet, everything rejected, nothing found, nothing left. Quickly she reassembled Miss Charlotte. She brought back the bone, the flesh, the organs. She hooked the right arm onto its shoulder and hooked on the left. She set her head on her shoulders and fitted her back into her dress. Put together again, Miss Charlotte suggested something within, hinted of it with her turning mouth and with the slight movement of her limbs under the pretty dress, gave a brief warning of it in the way the lace was sewed into the dress and the way the two large pins were placed to hold up her hair. All the while the red of the carpet and the smell of the carpet gave a flavor of Sunday and the catechism. There was a question then, she thought, for every answer. The little girls were weary of the boy’s speech and his dull gestures and weary of Miss Patty’s efforts to arouse his voice to eloquence. Luce looked from one to another, letting her self enter the arrogance of one, the humility of one, the stupidity of one. She saw what it would be not to know a rhythm, to march as Esther marched, on dull feet. The tone of the Sunday questioning pervaded the place, question and answer, final and done, well said. All that was asked had a reply, curt and certain. She looked at Miss Charlotte where she sat behind the piano, her eyes on the keys, and the questions took possession of the event. Who made you, Miss Charlotte? God. Why did God make Miss Charlotte? For His own glory.