Believers entered more and more into the spirit of their worship.
Whenever the refrain came in with its militant fervor, crude, but
sincere and effective, the singers seemed faith-intoxicated; and Sister
Martha in particular might have been treading the heavenly streets
instead of the meetinghouse floor, so complete was her absorption. The
voices at length grew softer, and the movement slower, and after a few
moments' reverent silence the company filed out of the room solemnly and
without speech.

I am as sure that heav'n is mine
As though my vision could define
Or pencil draw the boundary line
Where love and truth shall conquer.

"The Lord ain't shaken Susanna hard enough yet," thought Brother Ansel
shrewdly from his place in the rear. "She ain't altogether gathered
in, not by no manner o' means, because of that unregenerate son of Adam
she's left behind; but there's the makin's of a pow'ful good Shaker in
Susanna, if she finally takes holt!"

"What manner of life is my husband living, now that I have deserted him?
Who is being a mother to Jack?" These were the thoughts that troubled
Susanna Hathaway's soul as she crossed the grass to her own building.

VII. "The Lower Plane"

Brother Nathan Bennett was twenty years old and Sister Hetty Arnold
was eighteen. They had been left with the Shakers by their respective
parents ten years before, and, growing up in the faith, they formally
joined the Community when they reached the age of discretion. Thus they
had known each other from early childhood, never in the familiar way
common to the children of the world, but with the cool, cheerful,
casual, wholly impersonal attitude of Shaker friendship, a relation
seemingly outside of and superior to sex, a relation more like that of
two astral bodies than the more intimate one of a budding Adam and Eve.

When and where had this relationship changed its color and meaning?
Neither Nathan nor Hetty could have told. For years Nathan had sat at
his end of the young men's bench at the family or the public meeting,
with Hetty exactly opposite him at the end of the girls' row, and for
years they had looked across the dividing space at each other with
unstirred pulses. The rows of Sisters sat in serene dignity, one bench
behind another, and each Sister was like unto every other in Nathan's
vague, dreamy, boyishly indifferent eyes. Some of them were seventy
and some seventeen, but each modest figure sat in its place w