“How are you, father?” said Mary timidly.

“I am as well as Providence permits, Mary Ann.  You will find your mother in the kitchen.”

In the kitchen a cryptic, gray woman kissed her glacially on the forehead, and pointed out the potatoes which were not yet peeled for breakfast.  Mary sat in a wooden chair and decorticated spuds, with a thrill in her heart.

For breakfast there were grace, cold bread, potatoes, bacon, and tea.

“You are pursuing the same avocation in the city concerning which you have advised us from time to time by letter, I trust,” said her father.

“Yes,” said Mary, “I am still reviewing books for the same publication.”

After breakfast she helped wash the dishes, and then all three sat in straight-back chairs in the bare-floored parlor.

“It is my custom,” said the old man, “on the Sabbath day to read aloud from the great work entitled the ’Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgy,’ by the ecclesiastical philosopher and revered theologian, Jeremy Taylor.”

“I know it,” said Mary blissfully, folding her hands.

For two hours the numbers of the great Jeremy rolled forth like the notes of an oratorio played on the violoncello.  Mary sat gloating in the new sensation of racking physical discomfort that the wooden chair brought her.  Perhaps there is no happiness in life so perfect as the martyr’s.  Jeremy’s minor chords soothed her like the music of a tom-tom.  “Why, oh why,” she said to herself, “does some one not write words to it?”

At eleven they went to church in Crocusville.  The back of the pine bench on which she sat had a penitential forward tilt that would have brought St. Simeon down, in jealousy, from his pillar.  The preacher singled her out, and thundered upon her vicarious head the damnation of the world.  At each side of her an adamant parent held her rigidly to the bar of judgment.  An ant crawled upon her neck, but she dared not move.  She lowered her eyes before the congregation—­a hundred-eyed Cerberus that watched the gates through which her sins were fast thrusting her.  Her soul was filled with a delirious, almost a fanatic joy.  For she was out of the clutch of the tyrant, Freedom.  Dogma and creed pinioned her with beneficent cruelty, as steel braces bind the feet of a crippled child.  She was hedged, adjured, shackled, shored up, strait-jacketed, silenced, ordered.  When they came out the minister stopped to greet them.  Mary could only hang her head and answer “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” to his questions.  When she saw that the other women carried their hymn-books at their waists with their left hands, she blushed and moved hers there, too, from her right.

She took the three-o’clock train back to the city.  At nine she sat at the round table for dinner in the Cafe Andre.  Nearly the same crowd was there.

“Where have you been to-day?” asked Mrs. Pothunter.  “I ’phoned to you at twelve.”