“Your mother?” I asked.
The child stopped me sharply, “Is Father worse?”
“He’s worse,” I answered feebly. “You’d better—”
The child was brushed aside by her mother, who had stumbled forward from inside. She looked at me vaguely.
The girl turned on her mother. “I’m going up to Father. Go inside.”
The woman’s will flickered and then expired. She pulled the door back upon herself, shutting us into the hall. The child led and I followed back upstairs.
BILLY SUNDAY, SALESMAN
I
Before I heard Billy Sunday in Philadelphia I had formed a conception of him from the newspapers. First of all, he was a baseball player become revivalist. I imagined him as a ranting, screaming vulgarian, a mob orator who lashed himself and his audience into an ecstasy of cheap religious fervor, a sensationalist whose sermons were fables in slang. I thought of him as vividly, torrentially abusive, and I thought of his revival as an orgy in which hundreds of sinners ended by streaming in full view to the public mourners’ bench. With the penitents I associated the broken humanity of Magdalen, disheveled, tearful, prostrate, on her knees to the Lord. I thought of Billy Sunday presiding over a meeting that was tossed like trees in a storm.
However this preconception was formed, it at least had the merit of consistency. It was, that is to say, consistently inaccurate in every particular.