ide open before those within had learned
the first steps of how to walk sagely through it! Ah, if it comes to
blame, who goes scatheless in this heritage of error? I could have
shaped (we all could, you know) a better scheme for the universe, a plan
where we should not flourish at each other's expense, where the lion
should be lying down with the lamb now, where good and evil should not
be husband and wife, indissolubly married by a law of creation.

With such highly novel thoughts as these I descended the steps from my
researches at the corner of Court and Chancel streets an hour earlier
than my custom, because--well, I couldn't, that day, stand Cowpens for
another minute. Up at the corner of Court and Worship the people were
going decently into church; it was a sweet, gentle late Friday in Lent.
I had intended keeping out-of-doors, to smell the roses in the gardens,
to bask in the soft remnant of sunshine, to loiter and peep in through
the Kings Port garden gates, up the silent walks to the silent verandas.
But the slow stream of people took me, instead, into church with the
deeply veiled ladies of Kings Port, hushed in their perpetual mourning
for not only, I think, those husbands and brothers and sons whom the
war had turned to dust forty years ago, but also for the Cause, the lost
Cause, that died with them. I sat there among these Christians suckled
in a creed outworn, envying them their well-regulated faith; it,
too, was part of the town's repose and sweetness, together with the
old-fashioned roses and the old-fashioned ladies. Men, also, were in
the congregation--not many, to be sure, but all unanimously wearing that
expression of remarkable virtue which seems always to visit, when he
goes to church, the average good fellow who is no better than he should
be. I became, myself, filled with this same decorous inconsistency, and
was singing the hymn, when I caught sight of John Mayrant. What lady
was he with? It was just this that most annoyingly I couldn't make
out, because the unlucky disposition of things hid it. I caught
myself craning my neck and singing the hymn simultaneously and with no
difficulty, because all my childhood was in that hymn; I couldn't tell
when I hadn't known words and music by heart. Who was she? I tried for
a clear view when we sat down, and also, let me confess, when we knelt
down; I saw even less of her so; and my hope at the end of the service
was dashed by her slow but entire disappear