Yee," she admitted, briefly,
"some fall from grace, and leave us. The last was Lydia.
She was one of our children, and I thought she was of the chosen.
But she was only thirty when she fell away, and you can't
expect wisdom at that age. That was nearly twenty years ago.
When she has tasted the dregs of the world she will come back to us--
if she lives," Eldress Hannah ended.
Athalia listened breathlessly, her rapt, unhumorous eyes fixed
on Eldress Hannah's still face. Now and then she asked a question,
and once cried out that, after all, why wasn't it the way to live?
Peace and self-sacrifice and love! "Oh," she said,
turning to her husband, "can't you feel the attraction of it?
I should think even you could feel it!"
"I think I feel it--after a fashion," he said, mildly; "I think
I have always felt the attraction of community life."
Afterward, when they had left all this somnolent peace and begun
the long walk back to the station, he explained what he meant:
"I couldn't say so before the Eldress, but of course there are times
when anybody can feel the charm of getting rid of personal responsibility--
and that is what community life really means. It's the relief
of being a little cog in a big machine; in fact, the very attraction
of it is a sort of temptation, to my way of looking at it.
But it--well, it made me sleepy," he confessed.
For once his wife had no reply. She was very quiet on that return
journey in the cars, and in the days that followed she kept referring
to their visit with a persistence that surprised her husband.
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