The Recognitions
Davis (who could see the interior of objects), the same hunger that she brought to William Miller, satisfied as he was a century before that the end of the world was at hand, as evidence continued to "flow in from every quarter. The earth is reeling to and fro like a drunkard.' At this dread moment look! The clouds have burst asunder; the heavens appear; the great white throne is in sight! Amazement fills the Universe with awe! He comes! He comes! Behold the Saviour comes!" 
    She waited, thumbing the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, which she read as a literal transcription of the march of science, a parade led off by Darwin which had trod on simian feet throughout her life. She spent more time with Janet; or rather, she had Janet spend more time with her. After her original disapproval of the kitchen girl had been firmly established, Aunt May worked her toward salvation \tfith every discouragement she could supply. Janet was willing. She was, indeed, far on the way to that simple-mindedness which many despairingly intelligent people believe requisite for entering the kingdom of Heaven. This quality might prevent her from grasping some of the more complicated arcana which Aunt May tendered, still there was room for the residence of terror in the collapsing tenement of her mind. Darwin soon became as real to her as the Pope, the one resembling Heracles, the other triple-headed. From the carriage barn, the jingle of sleighbells reached them both. Aunt May, believing that she shut them out, hid them from herself in that part of her mind which turned upon her in dreams; Janet seemed to rush out to meet the hellish tinkling, and it was only on waking that her dreams began. But of all the distress that Janet endured, most persistent was her body's revenge on her attempt to disdain it. At first, hardly knowing how man and woman differed, she accepted the changes which grew upon her with no more regret than life itself produced. It was Aunt May who called her attention to the darkening of her chin, and asked ques-tions of such profound delicacy that, when confirmed, the consternation which descended upon the questioner was only equaled in that household by her reception of the news of the Scopes trial in distant Tennessee. Of that she could hardly speak, but sat shaking her head over Buffon's Natural History , reading again and again the article there on the animals called pygmies, and waiting, as though what she was waiting for was a secret from everyone but herself and her Creator. 
    Aunt May gradually withdrew from the affairs of the household, reading the Bible aloud to herself in her room, her voice only a sound barely broken by articulation. In this monotone it became so familiar a part of the house, that one paused when it was deflected, hearing it rise in pleading argument to the challenge of absolutes, — I am the Resurrection and the Life . . . , so plaintive that it seemed querulous, fearful not of doubting but of even admitting for an instant such existential possibility. Then the glimpse of humility was done, and the voice recovered the somnambulance of certitude. 
    She waited, her hair bobbed (not worn so for fashion from the outside world, where flappers were ushering it into smart society from the bawdy houses, where all fashions originate, but) in the clean shingles of a state hospital, always in the same trim arrangement, raising a clinically unsympathetic mirror to snip hairs from her nostrils. —This would be your grandfather's birthday, she told Wyatt, on May Day. —He would be eighty-six today, if he were alive, she added. She had been talking about John Huss a minute before, and looking the lean pale boy up and down, when he, for whom King Wenceslaus in that story bore striking resemblance to the Town Carpenter, broke out, 
    —But Grandfather, I ... I saw him yesterday . . . 
    —Your father's father, she corrected him sharply, but her voice broke, almost bitter as she looked away, not for the death

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