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one day you stop to wonder. She would not bring it up again, but if he did, she should have some way to answer him. She was not at all sure that he had been serious, that he was not teasing her. She might even have taken offense at the time, if there had seemed to be any point in it. A genteel project for a pious lady with time on her hands. How condescending. But that was what he did whenever he felt vulnerable — he found some way to sting, to make it clear that vulnerability was not all on one side. Poor man. But he was so practiced at reciting what he was also practiced at rejecting. He might have meant to draw her into some sort of argument and reject it, too, just to show her he could do it. He was uneasy. That was natural enough. And in fact he had made her embarrassed about that pleasant old habit of hers. Now she had to read the Bible in her room to avoid feeling like a hypocrite, like someone praying on a street corner. When Jack came out to the porch with his newspaper the next day and found her reading The Dollmaker he gave her a wistful, inquiring look, but he said nothing.

She did not know what it meant to be pious. She had never been anything else. Remember also thy creator in the days of thy youth. She had done that. She could hardly have done otherwise. Her father never let a day pass without reminding them that all goodness came from the Lord, all love, all beauty. And failure and fault instructed us in the will of God in the very fact of departing from it. Then there were grace and forgiveness to compensate, to put things right, and these were the greatest goodness of God after creation itself, so far as we mortals can know. Her father’s rapt delight in this belief put it beyond question, since it was so intrinsic to his nature, and they loved and enjoyed his nature, and laughed about it a little, too. Yes! He would achieve some triumph of extenuation and emerge from his study, eyes blazing, having solved the riddle, ready to forgive heroically, to go that extra mile. True, the slights and foibles for which he found extenuation necessary may have been minor or even questionable in some cases, evidence of a certain irritability on his part. But the gallantry of his response to them was no less handsome on that account.

As for herself, she did still pray on her knees. She also said or heard or thought a grace at every meal, even at a lunch counter or when she was with the fiancé. Train up a child in the way he should go and even when he is old he will not depart from it. The proverb was true in her case. And being at home only reinforced every habit that had been instilled in her there. Faith for her was habit and family loyalty, a reverence for the Bible which was also literary, admiration for her mother and father. And then that thrilling quiet of which she had never felt any need to speak. Her father had always said, God does not need our worship. We worship to enlarge our sense of the holy, so that we can feel and know the presence of the Lord, who is with us always. He said, Love is what it amounts to, a loftier love, and pleasure in a loving presence. She was pious, no doubt, though she would not have chosen that word to describe herself.

MAYBE SHE KEPT THE BIBLE OUT OF SIGHT BECAUSE SHE was afraid that if he spoke to her that way again she would have to tell him she had no certain notion what a soul is. She supposed it was not a mind or a self. Whatever they are. She supposed it was what the Lord saw when His regard fell upon any of us. But what can we know about that? Say we love and forgive, and enjoy the beauty of another life, however elusive it might be. Then, presumably, we have some idea of the soul we have encountered. That is what her father would say.

Maybe she had never before known anyone who felt, or admitted he felt, that the state of his soul was in question. Whatever might transpire in her father’s study, there had been only calm and confidence among his flock, to all appearances. Granting the many perils of spiritual complacency, and her father did grant them as often as Pharisees figured in the text, complacency was consistent with the customs and manners of Presbyterian Gilead and was therefore assumed to be justified in every case. Christian charity demanded no less, after all. Among the denominations of Gilead, charity on this point was not granted by all and to all in principle, but in practice good manners were usually adhered to, and in general the right to complacency was conceded on every side. Even her father’s sermons treated salvation as a thing for which they could be grateful as a body, as if, for their purposes at least, that problem had been sorted out between the Druids and the centurions at about the time of Hadrian. He did mention sin, but it was rarefied in his understanding of it, a matter of acts and omissions so commonplace that no one could be wholly innocent of them or especially alarmed by them, either — the uncharitable thought, the neglected courtesy. While on one hand this excused him from the mention of those aspects of life that seemed remotest from Sabbath and sunlight, on the other hand it made the point that the very nicest among them, even the most virtuous, were in no position to