The new family sat down for prayers. Not that Wully was a man deeply religious. But, as far as he knew, daily family prayers was one of the things a decent man does for his family. They had read that morning, according to custom, the first chapter of Genesis, and that had been most satisfactory, even quite personally interesting now, all about male and female created He them. It had come over Wully with a chuckle that divine commands have seldom been as satisfactory to humans as that first one was. And now, in the evening, he had read the first chapter of the New Testament. He resented that. He wouldn’t have read it if he had remembered what was in it. That story of Mary’s humiliation might seem ever so slightly to reflect upon his wife. And that right he denied even to the Word of God.
They were sitting together on the doorstep, and his lips were not far from her ear.
“Yon was a strange man, now, Chirstie!” he began.
“What man?”
“That Joseph in Matthew. I fear he hadn’t very good sense.”
“Why, Wully! And him a man in the Bible!”
“I don’t care! He didn’t know much! He didn’t know enough to take his own lassie till an angel told him! A man like that! He was daft. Or else——”
“I wonder at you, Wully! Or else what?”
“I doubt the lassie wasn’t really bonnie. Not like mine!”
A deeper embrace. More kisses.