staring at you like a cat. It's a fact he doesn't eat right, and he
forgets what's said as soon as a body speaks. Might he have some Chinese
disease, do you think?"

"It's not like a real sickness...."

The evening in the dreary sitting room with only the reddish illumination
of one lamp was almost unendurable. Her grandfather sat with broad wasted
hands gripping his shrunken knees, his eyes gazing stonily out above a
nose netted with fine blue veins and harsh mouth almost concealed by the
curtain of beard. Edward rose uneasily and returned, casting a swelling
and diminishing shadow--obscurely unnatural like himself--over the faded
and weather-stained wall paper. Her mother was bowed, speechless. Nettie
wanted to scream, to horrify them all with some outrageous remark. She
would have liked to knock the lamp from the table, send it crashing over
the floor, and see the flames spread out, consume the house, consume...
she stopped, horrified at her thoughts.

She didn't want things like that in her mind, she continued, but the echo
of dancing, of music, of the Salem Band marching up Essex Street with Mr.
Morse playing his celebrated silvery fanfare on the bugle. She wanted to
laugh, to talk, yes--to love. Why, she was young, barely twenty-one; and
here she was in a house like the old cemetery on Charter Street. Before
they went to bed her grandfather would read out from the Bible, but
always the Old Testament. Finally he rose and secured the volume, bound
in dusty calf, its pages brown along the edges. His voice rang in a slow
emphasized fervor:

"'Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken
the Lord, thy God, when he led thee by the way?