“A queer feeling comes over me at times, Billy. Somewhere ahead in life it seems I’m standing in a great church with faces as far as I can see. There’s millions of flowers, Billy, and soft autumn light is coming in at a window on the left. The music’s playing so it makes me want to bawl and everything’s wildly beautiful and there’s laughter and love and fragrance all around me. I can see that picture awfully plain at times, Billy. Down the long aisle from the back there’s a woman in white coming toward me—the most beautiful woman in all the world—really beautiful, Billy, not because I’m in love with her and she looks that way to me. That’s my wedding day, Billy—and it’s fine and grand. Do you ever picture yours that way?” “Somethin’ like it,” I answered. “Only mine’s in a house at night so my w-w-wife and I can sneak off in the dark and not get our hats busted with old shoes. They threw shoes at Matty Henderson’s weddin’ and broke the windows in the hack and the horses ran away and tipped over a banana stand.” III Edith Forge was growing along with Nathan, but saucer-eyed and awkward. At school they nicknamed her “Yard-sticks” and the insinuation made her furious. Nevertheless, despite her ungainliness, she was the worst “boy-struck” girl in town. The day that she was twelve and Johnathan came upon her giggling with an unknown boy in an empty Sunday-school room, the sex prohibition went promptly into effect for Edith also. But between Nathan and his sister was this difference: a certain sense of self-discipline and proclivity toward law, order and obedience, strong in the boy, was utterly lacking in the girl. She possessed instead a “terrible temper.” She didn’t propose to forego the most interesting subject on earth, Boys, not a little bit. She “had a tantrum” and for the first and only time in her life Johnathan Forge thrashed her. Thereupon—when the neighborhood had been duly edified and quieted—Edith went promptly into illicit alliance with the brother. “You help me to sneak out and I’ll help you!” she bargained. In her studies, Edith had the academic mentality of a child of eight. But at thirteen she knew how to dance better than that “questionable” Miss La Mott, the village teacher. And at fourteen Edith was insisting that school would never do her any good anyhow, and she wanted to go to work “sticking eight-point” in the local newspaper office “to buy herself some rags that looked decent.” Her mother prevailed upon her to stay in school by the compromise of filching money from the father’s trousers after he had retired. They tore holes in the man’s pockets so he would believe he lost the money. The petty loot went to purchase ribbons, waists, high-heeled shoes and two-dollar bouquets from Higgins’s greenhouse for Edith to wear to twenty-five-cent parties.