“O books you’ve never heard of. But I don’t think she gets her ideas from them. They’re hers, you bet.”
“Tessie, I guess, has learned a lot from her also.”
“She’s our Sunday school teacher,” Clara smiled.
“I see.”
“She has a religion. She believes—shall I tell you what she says?”
“Why not?”
“She says: ‘I believe in the power of Hate,
I believe in the truth of Sin.
I believe in the failure of Truth.’”
Fanny was silent.
“One day she made us learn all that by heart. Don’t take it too serious, Fan dear. She’d had a drop too much. She was jolly. So were we all.... It’s a joke, of course....”
“Clara, you know it’s no joke. You know it’s a religion.”