“They’ve always cared for me since I was a tiny baby,” Sharon whispered. “I do love them—I do love this dear old place. That’s—” She hesitated, then defiantly: “That’s why I brought you here!”
The butler took his bag up and unpacked, while Elmer wandered about the old bedroom, impressed, softly happy. The wall was a series of pale landscapes: manor houses beyond avenues of elms. The bed was a four-poster; the fireplace of white-enameled posts and mantel; and on the broad oak boards of the floor, polished by generations of forgotten feet, were hooked rugs of the days of crinoline.
“Golly, I’m so happy! I’ve come home!” sighed Elmer.
When the butler was gone, Elmer drifted to the window, and “Golly!” he said again. He had not realized that in the buggy they had climbed so high. Beyond rolling pasture and woods was the Shenandoah glowing with afternoon.
“Shen-an-doah!” he crooned.
Suddenly he was kneeling at the window, and for the first time since he had forsaken Jim Lefferts and football and joyous ribaldry, his soul was free of all the wickedness which had daubed it—oratorical ambitions, emotional orgasm, dead sayings of dull seers, dogmas, and piety. The golden winding river drew him, the sky uplifted him, and with outflung arms he prayed for deliverance from prayer.
“I’ve found her. Sharon. Oh, I’m not going on with this evangelistic bunk. Trapping idiots into holy monkey-shines! No, by God, I’ll be honest! I’ll tuck her under my arm and go out and fight. Business. Put it over. Build something big. And laugh, not snivel and shake hands with church-members! I’ll do it!”
Then and there ended his rebellion.
The vision of the beautiful river was hidden from him by a fog of compromises. . . . How could he keep away from evangelistic melodrama if he was to have Sharon? And to have Sharon was the one purpose of life. She loved her meetings, she would never leave them, and she would rule him. And—he was exalted by his own oratory.
“Besides! There is a lot to all this religious stuff. We do do good. Maybe we jolly ’em into emotions too much, but don’t that wake folks up from their ruts? Course it does!”