She turned wistfully to Adam:
“Would you like to have it?”
He showed no particular interest, and only said:
“I am indifferent. I have not understood any of this talk, but if you like we will eat it, for I cannot see that there is any objection to it.”
Poor ignorant things, the command of refrain had meant nothing to them, they were but children, and could not understand untried things and verbal abstractions which stood for matters outside of their little world and their narrow experience. Eve reached for an apple!--oh, farewell, Eden and your sinless joys, come poverty and pain, hunger and cold and heartbreak, bereavement, tears and shame, envy, strife, malice and dishonor, age, weariness, remorse; then desperation and the prayer for the release of death, indifferent that the gates of hell yawn beyond it!
She tasted--the fruit fell from her hand.
It was pitiful. She was like one who wakens slow and confusedly out of a sleep. She gazed half vacantly at me, then at Adam, holding her curtaining fleece of golden hair back with her hand; then her wandering glance fell upon her naked person. The red blood mounted to her cheek, and she sprang behind a bush and stood there crying, and saying:
“Oh, my modesty is lost to me--my unoffending form is become a shame to me!” She moaned and muttered in her pain, and dropped her head, saying, “I am degraded--I have fallen, oh, so low, and I shall never rise again.”
Adam’s eyes were fixed upon her in a dreamy amazement, for he could not understand what had happened, it being outside his world as yet, and her words having no meaning for one void of the Moral Sense. And now his wonder grew: for, unknown to Eve, her hundred years rose upon her, and faded the heaven of her eyes and the tints of her young flesh, and touched her hair with gray, and traced faint sprays of wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, and shrunk her form, and dulled the satin luster of her skin.
All this the fair boy saw: then loyally and bravely he took the apple and tasted it, saying nothing.