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row for the little house between the hills on the Redwine Circuit. This resolution is not in keeping with some views and sentiments I have written in these pages, but, being a woman, I thank God I can be as inconsistent as is necessary to feminine peace of mind. I reckon I'll never be satisfied now in the world or in the church without William. I can't seem to settle into any state of being of my own. I am not saying that I have not had a good time here, but, after all, I do not belong with the people of the world, either. Since I have been with Sarah I have had constantly to resist the temptation to speak to her about her soul, just from force of habit. I have never seen, in all my years with William, a woman of her age so youthfully, cheerfully unconscious of having a soul. And that is not the worst of it: I can feel the moral elbows of mine sticking out in every conversation, as if Heaven had made all my thoughts angular. It is a sort of horned integrity that grows up in a woman who follows the Gospel flag of the Methodist itinerancy. I am sure it is often embarrassing to Sarah and the girls, especially when they have company--not the kind of company William and I had, thinly-bred missionaries, and Bible pedlers, and tramps, and beggars, and occasionally, toward the last a little, sweet-faced, pod-headed deaconess--but Lilith ladies and one or two that William would call Delilahs, and handsome, sleek, intellectual men who appeared to be as ignorant of God as I am of natural history. I am not saying that they are not decent people, but they are not all there. I miss something out of them. If they have ever had souls they have had them removed, probably by a kind of reasoning surgery quite as effective as the literal surgery with which so many of them have their poor appendixes removed. I have told Sarah, and while she expresses regret I am sure she feels relieved. It is straining to have a person in the family who belongs to a different spiritual species. And now I have just finished packing my things. I am thankful I told the neighbors that I was going on a visit. I came suddenly to the conclusion to-day that it was only a visit because of a thing that happened. I have not been offended morally by anything I have seen in the theaters or other places of amusement, but I have had conscientious scruples about the churches here! This would be the Sabbath day far away in the country, where the hills
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