Illustrated by William Van Dresser
ISS DAISY MEARS, nine years of age, not comely but ambitious to be prominent, sat in her family pew upon a summer Sunday morning, thinking continuously though not religiously. She had ever a busy mind, but the sermon failed to touch it, which was no fault of her pastor. To Daisy all sermons were what Chinese music is to the lover of melody; she regarded them as merely a protraction of sound conveying mysterious satisfactions to those dreary and incomprehensible foreigners, grown people.
She sat beside her mother and her tall brother Renfrew, and for a little while amused herself by playing that the fine crease of Renfrew's trousers was the sharp edge of a knife. She pretended that it cut her when she touched it, so that her finger must first be solaced in her mouth, then bandaged with her handkerchief; but upon Renfrew's crossing his knees and turning decisively away, she could no longer reach the crease, and sought other means of enlivenment.
The great hollow of the church was shot with warm-colored light from the stained windows, where shafts of tremulous golden dust obliquely ascended and descended; and Daisy pretended to herself that the swimming and glimmering particles of dust were crowds of tiny people, that each gilded, infinitesimal speck, appearing and vanishing, had an errand of its own somewhere. “Lookin' for their chuldren,” she whispered to herself. Their children were lost, she decided; and the microscopic parents were almost instantly lost, too, as her eyes tried to follow them; but their places were always taken at once by other tiny fathers and mothers seeking their own truants.
After a while she tired of watching the everlasting fluctuations of the atomies, and decided to see what was going on in the pew behind her. Nothing exciting appeared to be happening there, though in the hope that something might turn up, she looked at the occupants long enough and thoroughly enough to make them uneasy. Only her white straw hat with its blue ribbon her forehead and her eyes were visible to them, but her eyes were elfin bright with curiosity and inscrutable derision. And the old gentleman whom she longest transfixed with this disturbing gaze had a new sin in his heart presently, in spite of knowing well what day it was and where he sat, supposedly in meekest worship.
He found himself compelled to ascertain if all the buttons of his white waistcoat were fastened, and discovering one to be missing entirely, just where she gazed with the strongest interest, he coughed fiercely, altered his attitude grew red, and frowned at the child; but he was forced to look away from her before she looked away from him. Unexpectedly she yawned, expressing herself audibly, and seeming to comment thus upon his behavior: then she turned forward again, not realizing that she had caused the Recording Angel to add hatred-in-a-church to the long list of the responsibilities of this old gentleman.
Next her attention centered itself upon the pew just in front of her. Therein sat a fat boy, not little, yet of about her own age; Master Robert Eliot, wearing out a great ennui by various sluggish devices. The top of his head was all that was to be seen of him from the rear just now, for he had sunk so low in his seat that this round head, covered with short, mouse-colored hair, rested against the mahogany rail. He was almost motionless, but not quite; there was perceptible a slight but fairly rhythmic movement of his scalp, and Daisy understood that he was practising his accomplishment of moving his ears. As he had but the single talent, Robert was naturally assiduous in bringing it to perfection.
Beside him, and next to their father, sat his sister Muriel who was grown up, but had not been so long grown up as she thought she had. That is to say, she was twenty-one, a year younger than Daisy's brother Renfrew, who may have learned something more from the sermon than Daisy did, but certainly not a great deal more. Seated directly behind Muriel, what he learned was everything possible about the color of her hair under stained-glass conditions of light; and rapt in this study, he looked indeed appropriate to the house he sat in—no other worshiper in the place showed a countenance so devout.