with a linen ephod," which, somehow, sounded insufficient; and indeed,
it appeared that Clytie was inclined to side wholly with Michal, David's
wife, who looked through a window and despised him when she saw him
"leaping and dancing before the Lord," uncovered save for the presumably
inadequate ephod of linen. She, Clytie, thought it not well that a man of
David's years and honour should "make himself ridiculous that way."

So it was early in this new life that the little boys came to walk as it
behooves those to walk who shall taste death. And to the littler boy,
prone to establish relations and likenesses among his mental images, the
big house itself would at times be more than itself to him. There was the
Front Room. Only the use of capital letters can indicate the manner in
which he was accustomed to regard it. Each Friday, when it was opened for
a solemn dusting, he timidly pierced its stately gloom from the threshold
of its door. It seemed to be an abode of dead joys--a place where they had
gone to reign forever in fixed and solemn festival. And while he could not
see God there, actually, neither in the horse-hair sofa nor the bleak
melodeon surmounted by tall vases of dyed grass, nor in the center-table
with its cemeterial top, nor under the empty horsehair and green-rep
chairs, set at expectant angles, nor in the cold, tall stove, ornately
set with jewels of polished nickel, and surely not in the somewhat
frivolous air-castle of cardboard and scarlet zephyr that fluttered from
the ceiling--yet in and over and through the dark of it was a forbidding
spirit that breathed out the cold mustiness of the tomb--an all-pervading
thing of gloom and majesty which was nothing in itself, yet a quality and
part of everything, even of himself when he looked in. And this quality or
spirit he conceived to be God--the more as it came to him in a flash of
divination that the superb and immaculate coal-stove must be like the Ark
of the Covenant.