These were the axioms that Vance had been brought up on; but when, after Floss’s accident, he dropped in from time to time to ask how she was, he found a strange attraction in listening to Harrison Delaney’s low, slightly drawling speech, and noticing the words he used—always good English words, rich and expressive, with hardly a concession to the local vernacular, or the passing epidemics of slang.
It was only when Floss began to get about again that she exercised her full magic. One day when Vance called he found her alone; and after that, instead of seeking out Harrison Delaney, he avoided him, and the pair met outside of the house. … His body and soul still glowed with the memory of it. But there was no use in thinking of that now. She’d been going with another fellow all the time … he knew it … and how she’d lied to him! He’d been a fool; and luckily it was all over. But he still averted his eyes from the house down the lane, where, only a few short months ago, he used to hang about after dark till she came out. On summer evenings they would go down to the maples by the river; there was a clump of bushes where you could lie hidden, breast to breast, and watch the moon and the white cloud reflections sail by, and the constellations march across the sky on their invisible bridges. …
The Scrimsers’ house had a Colonial porch, an open fireplace in the hall, and a view over the river. The door yard was always rather untidy; Mrs. Scrimser had planting plans, and meant some day to carry them out. But she would first have had to cut down a lot of half-dead bushes, and there never seemed to be anybody to do it, what with Grandpa’s sciatica, and the hired man’s coming so irregularly, and Grandma being engaged in tidying up everybody else’s door yard, materially and morally.
When Vance reached the porch she was sitting there in her rocking chair, her blown hair tossed back from her broad yellowish forehead, and her spectacles benevolently surveying the landscape. A lawn mower straddled the path and she called out to her grandson: “It’s the hired man’s day, but he’s gone to a big camp meeting at Swedenville, and your grandfather began to cut the grass so that we’d have everything looking nice when your father and mother come out on Sunday; but then he remembered he had an appointment at Mandel’s grocery, so I don’t see how it’ll get done.”
“Well, perhaps I’ll do it when I cool off,” said Vance, sitting down.
They all knew about Grandpa’s appointments. As soon as he was asked to put his hand to a domestic job he either felt a twinge of sciatica, or remembered that he’d promised to meet a man at Mandel’s grocery, or at the Elkington Hotel at Euphoria.
Mrs. Scrimser turned her eloquent gray eyes on her grandson. “Don’t a day like this almost make you feel as if you could get to God right through that blue up there?” she said, pointing heavenward with a big knotted hand. She had forgotten already about the abandoned lawn mower, and the need of tidying up. Whenever she saw her grandson all the groping aspirations in her unsatisfied nature woke and trembled into speech. But Vance did not care to hear about her God, who, once you stripped Him of her Biblical verbiage, was merely the Supreme Moralist of a great educational system in which Mrs. Scrimser held an important job.
“No, I don’t feel as if anything would take me near God. And I don’t exactly want to get near Him anyhow; what I want is to get way out beyond Him, out somewhere where He won’t look any bigger than a speck, and the god in me can sort of walk all round Him.”
Mrs. Scrimser glowed responsively: all the audacities enchanted her. “Oh, I see what you mean, Vanny,” she cried. All her life she had always been persuaded that she saw what people meant; and the conviction had borne her triumphantly from one pinnacle of credulity to another. But her grandson smiled away her enthusiasm. “No, you don’t; you don’t see my god at all; I mean, the god in me.”
His grandmother flushed up in her
