Aunt Hannah's face paled as though she feared that she must fall an innocent victim to the avenging bolt which might momentarily be expected to crash through the roof.
"Elizabeth," she gasped, "stop the child! Don't let her invite the wrath of the Almighty like that! Tell her how wicked it is to complain an' rebel against Infinite Wisdom."
They heard a low, rather contemptuous laugh, and saw Ham standing in the door. His coarse lumberman's socks were pulled up over his trousers' legs and splashed with mud of the stable lot.
"Aunt Hannah, what gave you the notion that there's anything wrong about complainin'?" he demanded shortly, and Mary knew that she had acquired a champion.
"Complainin' against God's will is a sin. Every person knows that." Aunt Hannah spoke with the aggrieved uncertainty of one unexpectedly called upon to defend an axiom. "An' for a girl to fret about her looks is worldly."
"Oh, I see," the boy nodded slowly, but his voice was insurgent. "I guess you think Almighty God wants the creatures He made to sit around and sing about there bein' work to do. I wonder you don't feel afraid to eat buckwheat cakes that He doesn't send down to you by an angel with His compliments. My idea is that He wants folks to do things for themselves and not to sing about it. As for being discontented, that's the one thing that drives the world around. I think God made discontent just for that."
Aunt Hannah moistened her lips. For decades she had been the member of a God-fearing, toiling family whose righteousness was the righteousness of stagnation. Now she stood face to face with radical heresy.
"But," she argued with some dumb feeling that she was defending Divinity, "the Scriptures teach contentment an' it's worldly to be vain."
"Why not be worldly?" flared the boy with a new and indomitable light in his eyes. "As for me I'm sick of this life in a place that's dry-rotting. What I want is the world—the whole of it, good an' bad. I want what you can win out of fighting. Mary wants to be pretty. Why shouldn't she? What does any woman get out of life except what men give her—and what man gives much to the ugly ones?"
"It ain't what men give that's to be counted a prize," came the pious rejoinder. "It's what heaven gives."