He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.

Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose bride became so homesick in Edom that she was in a way to perish, so that Salmon took her to her home and found work there for himself.  He even sang one catchy couplet of this to music of his own: 

  “For her dear sake whom he did pity,
  He took her back to Jersey City.”

But the Sabbath came inexorably to bring his sinful nature before him, just as the door of the Front Room was opened each week to remind him of the awful joys of Heaven.  And then his mind was like the desert of shifting sands.  There were so many things to be done and not done if one were to avert the wrath of this God that made the Front Room a cavern of terror, that rumbled threateningly in the prayer of his grandfather and shook the young minister to a white passion each Sabbath.

There was being good—­which was not to commit murder or be an atheist like Milo Barrus and spell God with a little g; and there was Coming to the Feet—­not so simple as it sounded, he could very well tell them; and there was the matter of Blood.  There were hymns, for example, that left him confused.  The “fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins” sounded interesting.  Vividly he saw the “sinners plunged beneath that flood” losing all their guilty stains.  It was entirely reasonable, and with an assumption of carelessness he glanced cautiously over his own body each morning to see if his guilty stains showed yet.  But who was Immanuel?  And where was this excellent fountain?

Then there was being “washed in the blood of the lamb,” which was considerably simpler—­except for the matter of its making one “whiter than snow.”  He was doubtful of this result, unless it was only poetry-writing which doesn’t mean everything it says.  He meant to try this sometime, when he could get a lamb, both as a means of grace and as a desirable experiment.

But plunging into the fountain filled with blood sounded far more important and effectual—­if it were only practicable.  As the sinners came out of this flood he thought they must look as Clytie did in her scarlet flannel petticoat the night he was taken with croup and she came running with the Magnetic Ointment—­even redder!

The big white house of Grandfather Delcher and Clytie, in short, was a house in which to be terrified and happy; anxious and well-fed.  And if its inner recesses took on too much gloomy portent one could always fly to the big yard where grew monarch elms and maples and a row of formal spruces; where the lawn on one side was bordered with beds of petunias and fuschias, tiger-lilies and dahlias; where were a great clump of white lilacs and many bushes of yellow roses; a lawn that stretched unbrokenly to the windows of the next big house where lived the gentle stranger with the soft, warm little voice who had chosen the good name of Lillian May.