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Updated: June 5, 2025
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!"
"Is this a graveyard?" Athalia demanded, impetuously. "Yee," he said, smiling; "it's our burial-place; we're Shakers." "But why are there just the stakes without names?" "Why should there be names?" he said, whimsically; "they have new names now." "Where is your community? Can we go and visit it?" "Yee; but we're not much to see," he said; "just men and women, like you. Only we're happy.
Perhaps if he had laughed at her.... But it is dangerous to laugh at unhumorous people, for if they get angry all is lost. So he never laughed, nor in all their talks did he ever reproach her for not loving him. Once only his plea was personal and even then it was only indirectly so. "Athalia," he said, "there's only one kind of pain in this world that never gets cured.
"Why, we've hardly come halfway!" she said. Her husband, plodding along behind her, nodded ruefully. "Hardly," he said. In her slim prettiness Athalia Hall looked like a girl, but she was thirty-four. Part of the girlishness lay in the smoothness of her white forehead and in the sincere intensity of her gaze.
They had left the train at five o'clock in the morning, and were sitting in the station awaiting the express when Athalia had had this impulse to climb the hill. "It looks pretty steep," Lewis objected; and she flung out her hands with an impatient gesture. "I love to climb!" she said.
The Eldress smiled doubtfully, but Athalia, with a rapturous upward look, said, "May the Lord guide him!" then added, practically, "It won't amount to anything. He thinks Shakerism isn't human." "That's not against it, that's not against it!" Nathan declared, smiling; "I've told him so a dozen times!"
"She IS useful," Sister Jane declared; "do you know, she got through the churning before nine? I'd 'a' been at it until eleven!" "Athalia is like one of those candles that have a streak of soft wax in 'em," Eldress Hannah murmured; "but she's useful, as you say, Jane." In January, when the Eldress fell ill, Athalia was especially useful.
Two of them were dressed like world's people, but the others wore small gray shoulder-capes buttoned to their chins, and little caps of white net stretched smoothly over wire frames; the narrow shirrings inside the frames fitted so close to their peaceful, wrinkled foreheads that no hair could be seen. "I wish I could sit and sort herbs!" Athalia said, under her breath. Brother Nathan chuckled.
I have never forgotten it. I wish to God I could! 'Thalia, I don't want you to suffer that kind of pain." She saw the implication rather than the warning, and she burst out, angrily, that she wasn't doing this for "pleasure"; she was doing it for principle! It was for the salvation of her soul! "Athalia," he said, solemnly, "the salvation of our souls depends on doing our duty."
He was afraid it would hurt her, some day, when she realized it; well, when she came to herself, when she got through her playing at Shakerism, he must not let her know how great the pain had been; she would suffer too much if she should understand his misery: and Athalia didn't bear suffering well.... But how long she had been getting over Shakerism!
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