it seems somehow wrong, almost indecent, for offspring to feel passion.
It had been all right for her and her generation, but incomprehensible
in her own parents, and now it was equally so when she saw it beginning
to work out in her children. She supposed vaguely, confronted by the
fact that the race went on multiplying, that everyone might feel like
that about other people, but differently about themselves.

Broad daylight had seen Archelaus return, but by then Annie had fallen
into a heavy sleep and did not hear his entry, though there was nothing
furtive about it; rather was it the unashamed clatter of the master. She
awoke to deadness of all feeling except the thought of the revival that
was to sweep like a flail over the land, and in her tired but avid mind
that winnowing began to assume the proportions of the chief thing for
which to live. She saw herself in it, and with her, by a flash of
inspiration, not the fair eldest-born who had failed her, but the
youngest--he whom she could flaunt in the face of God and men. Some
receptacle for passion Annie had to have, and being an uneducated woman,
it had to be a personal one. Archelaus had gone beyond her clutch, Tom
she knew would evade her, John-James she, like Ishmael, found
unresponsive. As for girls, she placed them below any male creature. She
loved Vassie far more than she did Ishmael, if she could be said to love
him at all, but nevertheless he was a son. Her punishment for sin might
be that those other more dearly loved ones were not to be among the
saved, but this child she could shake in the face of the Almighty....

It was by this new passion that Ishmael, with his foolish little plans
of a new importance, found himself caught up and held relentlessly.