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fairly delightful thing, though this was an opinion she kept to herself. She knew from books and also from fragments of rumors on the same general subject that she was wrong to take so simple a view of the matter. Her parents really were the last people on earth to weep and whisper over the birth of a grandchild, and she knew she needed to find some way to take their sorrow into account. So much had never been explained to her. They were that kind of family. Things necessary to know were passed along brother to brother, sister to sister, and this was sufficient for most purposes, despite inevitable error and sensationalism. But the chain of transmission was broken when Grace left to live with Hope in Minneapolis, and her parents had forgotten the problem, having solong depended on their children to startle one another with this information.
    Her parents were, in their way, fully as innocent as she was, having put aside their innocence on practical grounds, not in the belief that it had been discredited, but because they accepted the terms of life in this world as a treaty to be preferred to conflict, though by no means ideal in itself. Experience had taught them that truth had sharp edges and hard corners, and could be seriously at odds with kindness. They had learned that excessive devotion to even the highest things seemed and probably was sanctimonious, and that the one sufficient measure of excess was that look of annoyance, confirmed in themselves by a twinge of embarrassment, that meant the line had been crossed. They recognized grace in the readiness of the darkest sinner to take a little joke, a few self-effacing words, as an apology. This was something her father in particular, who was morally strenuous but sociable, too, had learned to appreciate cordially. Truly there were perils on every side in the pastoral life, and her father was wary of them all. With the dreadful rigor of an upright child Glory had noted and pondered his accommodations, however minor or defensible. This was in part an effect of her finding herself in a suddenly quiet house with only her parents to think about.
    Still, Glory’s view of things had an authority for them precisely because it was naïve. A baby is a splendid gift of God, after all. Her father had never christened one without saying those words. And if Jack had behaved disgracefully toward its mother—“She is so young, so young!” her father whispered—this did not alter the basic fact that the infant was a child of the family, deserving of welcome and embrace. Glory had really not understood why misery was any important part of her parents’ response to the situation. The girl could not have been much younger than Glory herself, and she was fairly sure she would not have minded having a baby. Imbecile as she was then with loneliness and youth, and far as she was from understanding why her father should feel that arrogancehad a part in it all, or cruelty. Or why he whispered those words with such bitter emphasis. Every Sunday when the boys were home her father would stand at the front of the church, waiting for the pews to fill. Her brothers would file in, three of them, and her father would wait a moment more, watching the doorway, glancing up at the balcony. Then his head would fall to one side, regret and forgiveness in one gesture. Sometimes, rarely, he would nod to himself and smile, and then they knew that Jack was there, and that the sermon would be about joy and the goodness of God no matter what the text was. She had never heard her father say such hard words—the cruelty of it! the arrogance!—and she had never seen him brood and mutter for days at a time, as if he were absorbing the fact that some transgressions are beyond a mere mortal’s capacity to forgive. How often those same hard, necessary words had come to her mind.
    But in those days their lives were lived so publicly, it had seemed to her they might as well just acknowledge what everyone would have