"Saint James' Church is only a few minutes' walk from here; but I suppose you are a Presbyterian, like your uncle?"
His respectability he saw hung in the balance—for to have avowed himself a freethinker would have dyed him socially only one shade less black than to have declared himself a Republican—so, escaping without a further confession of faith, he ascended to his room and applied himself anew to the regeneration of the American drama. The dull gold light, which slept on the brick walls, began presently to slant in long beams over the roofs, which mounted like steps up the hillside, while as the morning advanced, the mellow sound of chimes floated out on the stillness, calling Dinwiddians to worship, as it had called their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them. The Sabbath calm, so heavy that an axe could hardly have dispelled it, filled the curving streets and the square gardens like an invisible fog—a fog that dulled the brain and weighed down the eyelids and made the grim walls of the Treadwell tobacco factory look as if they were rising out of a dream. Into this dream, under the thick boughs of mulberry trees, there passed presently a thin file of people, walking alone or in pairs. The men were mostly old; but the women were of every age, and all except the very young were clad in mourning and wore hanging veils on their bonnets. Though Oliver did not know it, he was, in reality, watching a procession of those who, having once embraced a cause and lost it, were content to go on quietly in a hush of memory for the rest of life. Passion had once inflamed them, but they moved now in the inviolable peace which comes only to those who have nothing left that they may lose. At the end of the line, in the middle of the earthen roadbed walked an old horse, with an earnest face and a dump cart hitched to him, and in the cart were the boxes of books which Susan had helped Oliver to pack the evening before. "Who'd have thought she'd get them here so soon?" he said to himself. "By George, she is a wonder! And Sunday too!"
The old horse, having reached the hilltop, disappeared behind the next house, and ten minutes later Mrs. Peachey escorted the smallest of his boxes into his bedroom.
"Your cousin is downstairs, but I didn't know whether you wanted me to bring her up here or not?" she said.
"Of course you do, don't you, Oliver?" asked Susan's voice, and entering the room, she coolly presented her cheek to him. This coolness, which impressed him almost as much as her extraordinary capability, made him feel sometimes as if she had built a stone wall between them. Years afterwards he asked himself if this was why his admiration for her had never warmed into love?
"Well, you're a good one!" he exclaimed, as she drew back from the casual embrace.
"I knew you were here," she answered, "because John Henry Pendleton" (was it his imagination or did the faintest blush tinge her face?) "saw Major Peachey last night and told me on his way home."
"You can't help me straighten up, I suppose? The room looks a sight."
"Not now—I'm on my way to church, and I'll be late if I don't hurry." She wore a grey cashmere dress, made with a draped polonaise which accentuated her rather full hips, and a hat with a steeple crown that did not suit the Treadwell arch of her nose. He thought she looked plain, but he did not realize that in another dress and hat she might have been almost beautiful—that she was, indeed, one of those large-minded, passionately honest women who, in their scorn of pretence or affectation, rarely condescend to make the best of their appearances. To have consciously selected a becoming hat would have seemed to her a species of coquetry, and coquetry, even the most innocent, she held in abhorrence. Her sincerity was not only intellectual; it was of that rarer sort which has its root in a physical instinct.
After she had gone, he worked steadily for a couple of hours, and then opened one of the boxes Susan had brought and arranged a few of his books in a row on the mantelpiece. It was while he stood still undecided whether to place "The Origin of Species" or "The Critique of Pure Reason" on the end nearest his bed, that a knock came at his door, and the figure of Miss Priscilla Batte, attired in a black silk dolman with bugle trimmings, stood revealed on the threshold.