A mild regret flickered into the face of the older woman. "I s'pose they think they've got one."
She must have been pretty once, Dorinda thought while she watched her. She must have been educated to refinements of taste and niceties of manner; yet marriage had been too strong for her, and had conquered her.
"I don't see how you've stood it!" she exclaimed, with the indignant pity of youth.
Mrs. Oakley's bleak eyes, from which all inner glory had departed, rested pensively on her daughter. "There ain't but one way to stand things," she returned slowly. "There ain't but one thing that keeps you going and keeps a farm going, and that is religion. If you ain't got religion to lean back on, you'd just as well give up trying to live in the country."
"I don't feel that way about religion," Dorinda said obstinately. "I want to be happy."
"You're too young yet. Your great-grandfather used to say that most people never came to God as long as there was anywhere else for them to go."
"Was that true of great-grandfather?"
"It must have been. He told me once that he didn't come to Christ until he had thirsted for blood."
To Dorinda this seemed an indirect way to divine grace; but it made her great-grandfather appear human to her for the only time in her life.
"But he must have had something else first," she observed logically. "People always seem to have had something else first, or they wouldn't have found out how worthless it is. You must have been in love once, even if you have forgotten it."