Many a small boy unconsciously stored away a memory of the erect wholesome figure as a possible exemplar for future consideration.
His wife found Sunday a rather distracting day. It was eminently satisfying, doubtless, to be able to show off such a number of stylish costumes. Joel had always been able to have her dress well. There was one wine-colored cashmere with a polonaise and bustle which she had considered particularly fetching.
“I never put the dress on in the old days,” she said to her girls, showing them the truly awe-inspiring picture, “without thinking to myself: ‘I certainly am glad I married Joel.’ I always did love fine clothes. Sylvia, I think you must have inherited my taste.”
Sylvia groaned. “Oh, no, mamma, I don’t deserve that!”
Clothes, however, had not quite compensated Mrs. Marshall for the arduousness otherwise entailed in the observance of the Sabbath. There was always company. Joel, a caterer, knew “how it ought to be done.” Then there were the four children to dress and get off, and the constant oversight of them when they came home to see that they did not break the thousand inhibitions which made the day sacred.
“I used to hate it so,” Sandy laughed. “Remember, Phil, how we used to try to find those awful sailor collars—I think they’re called Buster Browns now—and see if we couldn’t hide them or mark them up before the next Sunday? Mother must have had a million of them, for we were never able to exhaust her supply.”
“Weren’t you sights!” Sylvia teased. “You were fat, Alec, and your face rose large and round over your collar like a full moon. You had two eyes set away back from your fat cheeks and you had to bend your head way over to look down—”
“And you wore a grayish-brownish-greenery-yallery round straw hat,” interposed Joanna.
“Don’t you talk,” Philip jeered at them, “I remember two poke bonnets, reddish, with fuzzy stuff sticking up over them.”
“Astrakhan. Yes, I remember,” Sylvia told him. “Weren’t they awful? And the deadliness of Sunday afternoon! You boys sitting around knocking your feet against the rungs of the chairs. Such glooms!”
“Yes, and you,” said Sandy, assuming a solemn countenance. “Looking dejectedly out of the window, your face propped in your hands!”
“Joanna was the only one who got anything out of those Sundays,” Philip mused. “I can see her now flat on her tummy reading the life of some exemplary female.”
“Notable women of color,” laughed Joanna. “I adored Sunday.”
Certainly no flavor of those past days spoiled the Marshalls’ enjoyment in these later years. Rather remarkably the whole family still went to church, Mr. and Mrs. Marshall from years of long habit, Sylvia because she rather liked to please her mother and because it amused her to have Brian Spencer, whom churchgoing bored to the point of agony, obey her wish that he should go. Sandy, now in the real estate business, thought it gave him standing in the community.
Philip’s reasons were various. Chiefly he went to church as he went to many meetings, because he was interested in seeing groups of colored people together. He had a strong desire to sense the social consciousness, for he was trying to learn just what stirred mass feeling and into what channels it could be directed. A minister of the poorest type was an unfailing source of study to him. How would this man sway the people? And what would he ask of them once he had them ready to listen to his will? Philip always dreamed of a leader who should recognize that psychological moment and who would guide a whole race forward to the realization of its steadily increasing strength.
He dreamed many dreams sitting crosswise in the far corner of his pew, his back partly against the wall, partly against the seat, his lean, brown, slightly haggard face bent forward. He had already the somewhat remote glance of the thinker, though his firm chin pronounced him no less the man of action. Maggie Ellersley, sitting across the church from him, watching him a little covertly under her drooping hat brim, used to think he looked like a man who would take what he wanted.
“If only he knew what he wanted,” she half sighed. Joanna was the soloist of the choir these days, sole raison d’être of her churchgoing. Her mezzo voice full and pulsing and gold brought throngs to the church every Sunday.
“There is a green hill far away,” she sang, and the puzzled, groping congregation turned its sea of black and brown, yellow and white faces toward her and knew a sudden peace. Even Philip stopped his restless inner queries.
At times like these Peter Bye felt his very heart leap toward her.
Joanna with her cool eyes and steady head cared almost nothing about this. She never saw herself in this scene. Always in her mind’s eye she was far, far away from the church, in a great hall, in a crowded theater. There would be tier on tier of faces rising, rising above her. And tomorrow there would be the critics. …
The Sundays passed thus weekend to weekend. One of them stood out in Joanna’s memory. Philip, a Harvard junior, was home on his summer vacation, but he and Sylvia and Sandy had gone to visit their mother’s folks in Philadelphia.
Joanna, Brian Spencer, Peter, and Maggie Ellersley stepped out of church and walked down the torrid street. It was early June, but the weather was that of August.
“Our children are growing up,” said Mrs. Marshall to Mrs.
Ellersley, lingering a moment in the shady vestibule. “See how tall Joanna and Maggie have grown. They were the littlest things!”
Mrs. Ellersley followed the group with a wistful eye. Of late she had begun to have some idea of Maggie’s unspoken desires. She wished it were Philip instead of Brian walking
