The children themselves preserved the Sabbath. If Ursula in her vanity sang:
"Il était un' bergère
Et ron-ron-ron petit patapon,"
Theresa was sure to cry:
"That's not a Sunday song, our Ursula."
"You don't know," replied Ursula, superior. Nevertheless, she wavered. And her song faded down before she came to the end.
Because, though she did not know it, her Sunday was very precious to her. She found herself in a strange, undefined place, where her spirit could wander in dreams, unassailed.
The white-robed spirit of Christ passed between olive trees. It was a vision, not a reality. And she herself partook of the visionary being. There was the voice in the night calling, "Samuel, Samuel!" And still the voice called in the night. But not this night, nor last night, but in the unfathomed night of Sunday, of the Sabbath silence.
There was Sin, the serpent, in whom was also wisdom. There was Judas with the money and the kiss.
But there was no actual Sin. If Ursula slapped Theresa across the face, even on a Sunday, that was not Sin, the everlasting. It was misbehaviour. If Billy played truant from Sunday school, he was bad, he was wicked, but he was not a Sinner.
Sin was absolute and everlasting: wickedness and badness were temporary and relative. When Billy, catching up the local jargon, called Cassie a "sinner," everybody detested him. Yet when there came to the Marsh a flippetty-floppetty fox-hound puppy, he was mischievously christened "Sinner."
The Brangwens shrank from applying their religion to their own immediate actions. They wanted the sense of the eternal and immortal, not a list of rules for everyday conduct. Therefore they were badly-behaved children, headstrong and arrogant, though their feelings were generous. They had, moreover—intolerable to their ordinary neighbours—a proud gesture, that did not fit with the jealous idea of the democratic Christian. So that they were always extraordinary, outside of the ordinary.
How bitterly Ursula resented her first acquaintance with evangelical teachings. She got a peculiar thrill from the application of salvation to her own personal case. "Jesus
