III
Cleo Benham had spent three years in the Sparta Women’s College, specializing in piano, organ, French, English literature, strictly expurgated, and study of the Bible. Returned to Banjo Crossing, she was a fervent church-worker. She played the organ and rehearsed the choir; she was the superintendent of the juvenile department in the Sunday School; she decorated the church for Easter, for funerals, for the Halloween Supper.
She was twenty-seven, five years younger than Elmer.
Though she was not very lively in summer-evening front-porch chatter, though on the few occasions when she sinned against the Discipline and danced she seemed a little heavy on her feet, though she had a corseted purity which was dismaying to the earthy young men of Banjo Crossing, yet she was handsome, she was kind, and her father was reputed to be worth not a cent less than seventy-five thousand dollars. So almost every eligible male in the vicinity had hinted at proposing to her.
Gently and compassionately she had rejected them one by one. Marriage must, she felt, be a sacrament; she must be the helpmate of someone who was “doing a tremendous amount of good in the world.” This good she identified with medicine or preaching.
Her friends assured her, “My! With your Bible training and your music and all, you’d make a perfect pastor’s wife. Just dandy! You’d be such a help to him.”
But no detached preacher or doctor had happened along, and she had remained insulated, a little puzzled, hungry over the children of her friends, each year more passionately given to hymnody and agonized solitary prayer.
Now, with innocent boldness, she was exclaiming to Elmer: “We were so afraid the bishop would send us some pastor that was old and worn-out. The people here are lovely, but they’re kind of slow-going; they need somebody to wake them up. I’m so glad he sent somebody that was young and attractive—Oh, my, I shouldn’t have said that! I was just thinking of the church, you understand.”
Her eyes said that she had not been just thinking of the church.
She looked at her wristwatch (the first in Banjo Crossing) and chanted, “Why, my gracious, it’s six o’clock! Would you like to walk home with me instead of going to Mrs. Clark’s—you could wash up at Papa’s.”
“You can’t lose me!” exulted Elmer, hastily amending, “—as the slangy youngers say! Yes, indeed, I should be very pleased to have the pleasure of walking home with you.”
Under the elms, past the rosebushes, through dust emblazoned by the declining sun, he walked with his stately abbess.
He knew that she was the sort of wife who would help him to capture a bishopric. He persuaded himself that, with all her virtue, she would eventually be interesting to kiss. He noted that they “made a fine couple.” He told himself that she was the first woman he had ever found who was worthy of him. … Then he remembered Sharon. … But the pang lasted only a moment, in the secure village peace, in the gentle flow of Cleo’s voice.