The minister pronounced the benediction and was on his way to the door when she apprehended Henry, who had remained behind to shut the windows. She noticed that she was not the first: he was already in conversation with a tall young man whose face belonged to the Wade family, but whose body showed extensive Talbert influence. He was Talbert Wade, of course. She had not seen him since he was a child.

  “. . . shouldn’t do it like that, Mr. Hackett,” he was saying. “We are Methodists.”

  She listened to young Talbert’s reasons why Mr. Hackett shouldn’t do it like that. They were sound. Henry interrupted Talbert and introduced them.

  “Young man,” she said, “you have either been to church in England or you watched the Coronation on television with considerable acuteness. Which is it?”

  “Both,” he said, and grinned delightedly.

  “Henry?” she said.

  Henry threw up his hands as if to ward off whatever was coming.

  “Don’t look at me,” he said. “It’s the way they told us to sing it at Camp Charles Wesley.”

  “You aren’t going to take something like that lying down, are you?” she said. “Who told you to do that?”

  “The music instructor. He was from New Jersey. He taught a class in what was wrong with Southern church music.”

  “He did, did he?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say was wrong with it?”

  “He said we might as well be singing, ‘Stick your snout under the spout where the Gospel comes out,’ as most of the things we sing. Said they ought to ban Fanny Crosby by church law and that ‘Rock of Ages’ was an abomination unto the Lord.”

  “Oh?”

  “He said we ought to pep up The Doxology.”

  “Pep it up? How?”

  “Like we sang it today.”

  She sat down in the front pew. Apparently, she thought, our brethren in the northland are not content merely with the Supreme Court’s activities: they are now trying to change our hymns on us.

  Henry said, “He told us we ought to get rid of the Southern hymns and learn some other ones. I don’t like it—ones he suggested don’t even have tunes.”

  “Southern hymns?” she said. “Now, Henry, let’s analyze this. Let’s see now, he wants us to sing The Doxology down the line with nothing less than the Church of England, but then he turns square around and wants to throw out—‘Abide with Me’?”

  “Right.”

  “Lyte. What about ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’?”

  “That’s another one,” said Henry. “He gave us a list, and I think that’s on it.”

  “Gave you a list, did he? I suppose ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ is included?”

  “At the top,” said Henry.

  “H.F. Lyte, Isaac Watts, Sabine Baring-Gould.” She permitted herself the luxury of rolling out the last name in Maycomb County accents: long a’s, i’s, and a pause between syllables. It felt wonderful. “Every one an Englishman, Henry, good and true. Wants to throw them out but sing The Doxology like we were all in Westminster Abbey, does he? Well let me tell you something—”

  She looked up at Henry, who was nodding agreement, and at Talbert Wade, who had stood so silently all the while she had forgotten he was there.

  “Your man’s a snob, Henry, and that’s a fact.”

  “He was sort of a sissy,” said Henry.

  “I’ll bet he was. Are you going along with all this nonsense?”

  “Heavens no,” he said. “I thought I’d try it once, just to make sure of what I’d already guessed. Congregation’ll never learn it. Besides, I like the old ones.”

  “So do I, Henry,” she said.

  She rose to go. “Well, goodbye. I’ll see you this time next year. I’m leaving this coming Friday.”

  They shook hands under cover of his soft farewell phrases. She nodded to Talbert, and was halfway across the churchyard when she turned and discovered Talbert at her heels.

  “Can I give you a lift?” she asked.

  “No thanks. I have my own car.”

  As she slid under the steering wheel she noticed he was still hovering. He was a nice-looking child, combining the best elements of the Talberts and the Wades. He was perhaps twenty-one years old.

  “Would it be all right if I came to see you this afternoon?” he said.

  “Of course,” she said, and changed her mind. There would be few golf-playing days left, and she resented giving up her Sunday afternoon routine to entertain the young. She contemplated him somewhat gloomily: he would be full of Europe—he looked suspiciously as if he had returned from a tour and had picked up a Brooks Brothers suit on the way home. He was obviously intelligent, but he would have only just emerged from the comatose cocoon of his teens into that age of fierce brightness where every human emotion is examined and carefully labeled; he would be wise, he would be overwhelmingly definite, he would be appalling, and she would be rude.

  He sensed her annoyance. “I wouldn’t be breaking up your afternoon, would I?” he said.

  “Of course not,” she said. “You drink coffee, don’t you? Good.”

  She drove home. Her father and sister were in Mobile that weekend, and she was alone in the house. She ate lunch on the kitchen table, changed into slacks, worked herself into a bad humor, and had just collapsed on the porch lounger when the doorbell rang.

  Talbert had wasted no time. He greeted her with a kind of assurance she found odd in a Maycomb boy. His manners were as easy and graceful as his long-legged lope. She began to feel better, then worse: he was probably incurably in love with himself.

  “I thought I would die in church this morning,” he said, as he sat down.

  She thought longingly of the golf course, and of how much pleasure she found in the crisp click of a ball well hit. With what she hoped was invisible effort, she tried to organize her feelings into some semblance of fair-mindedness: give the boy a chance, she thought. Give the child a chance.

  “I thought I would curl up and die,” Talbert amended, when she did not answer him immediately.

  “You seem to have recovered,” she said politely. “What are you majoring in?

  “Economics,” he said, which was sufficient to make her abandon any generous impulses she may have had about carrying her share of the load.

  “Then I’m afraid we are in for a High Evangelical afternoon,” she murmured.

  “What?” he said.

  “I said I’m afraid we are in for a High Evangelical afternoon.”

  If his hide was pierced he did not show it; thus her own bad behavior came home to roost. She said, “You know how Maycomb is. There’s not a thing to do in this town on Sunday but read Holy Living and Dying.”

  “Yes,” he said, grinning at her. “I’ve been home a week now, and I’m already feeling like Augustus J.C. Hare.”

  “What?” she said.

  “I said I’ve—”

  “I beg your pardon, Talbert, I heard you the first time—”

  She looked at him sharply. He had not quite become a man: his face and hands were smooth, as yet unset by the mold of maturity.

  “—I was just wondering out of what rarefied firmament you snatched Augustus J.C. Hare?”

  “You slay me the way you talk sometimes,” said Talbert. “This morning—”

  “I shall be more disposed to slay you if you don’t tell me what the hell you know about Augustus J.C. Hare,” she said grimly.

  “Oh you know.” The boy raised his hands lazily, palms upward, and let them fall in his lap. “He got mixed up with all those Maurices when he was a child and they put him in back braces and clamps and snatched his dinner out from under him in case he developed gluttony and were always sending for Uncle Julius to come over and pull him out from under the bed. Uncle Julius married a Maurice, you know, and she was Augustus’s adopted mother’s best friend so he was brought up an Evangelical and the poor old soul was thirty-five before—”

  For the second time that Sunday she was stunned to silence.

  “—before he—ah, you know—and every time it happened he put a big black cross in his journal!”

  Somewhat hastily, she told Talbert she would get the coffee. Safely in the kitchen, she doubled over the sink with silent laughter. In some confusion, she attempted to sift Talbert’s narrative for his source material: Hare’s memoirs, of course, but she had a dim recollection that the last fact was in one of Somerset Maugham’s more obscure essays. Well, she thought.

  But she served Talbert coffee without comment. She was far from trusting him: this was probably Talbert’s set piece of entertainment for older women, and she was positive he regarded her as an advanced case of caducity. She had met many of his kind; they could be found in abundance sitting on the edges of sofas in Upper East Side apartments. She decided to tackle him, stomp on him, and get it over with quickly. There would still be time for eighteen holes before sundown.

  “You remember when Uncle Julius got engaged?” she asked casually, bringing her heavy artillery to the front.

  Talbert looked at a distant light-pole. “‘It was the most dismal of betrothals,’” he quoted. “‘Esther sobbed and cried, my mother sobbed and cried, Uncle Julius sobbed and cried daily. I used to see them sitting holding each other’s hands and crying on the banks of the Rotha.’ That’s in the first volume.”

  “You young fiend,” she said.

  Talbert wallowed like a puppy in the waves of her approval.

  “What on earth made you memorize The Story of My Life?” she said. “You seem to be athletic enough.”

  “I loved it when I read it.”

  “That is no answer. What else have you read? This kind of thing, I mean.”

  “Don’t look at me like that and I’ll try to tell you.”

  She was one of those people who, when registering approbation, look furious, and she was unaware until then that she had pinned Talbert to his chair like a moth. She released him with the most cordial smile she could muster, and he relaxed.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Do go on.”

  “Well, you might say that the Victorians are a sort of hobby of mine. I’ve read everything about them I can get my hands on.”

  “Oh? And what plunged you into the 19th century?”

  “I was homesick.”

  “Homesick?”

  “You know, I’ve been at Northwestern for three years now. It’s different up there. You know how it is. Well, Mamma and Daddy said I’d drink up the earth at Alabama so they made me go to Northwestern. At first it was hell but it began to wear off. Well, I had to read Strachey’s Victoria—isn’t that the greatest thing you ever read? ”

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, anyway I had to read it for a lit course and it reminded me so much of Maycomb one thing led to another, you know.”

  “Reminded you so much of Maycomb?”

  Talbert nodded. “The families and things. All the yapping that went on—”

  “The families and things?”

  “Yes. You know, how everybody was or almost was kin to everybody else. It’s just like here in Maycomb County.”

  “Talbert,” she said, with formidable patience, “how can someone be almost kin to somebody else?”

  “Well, you know. Let’s see now. You remember Frank Buckland, don’t you?”

  In spite of herself, she was being drawn into Talbert Wade’s fantastical world: “You mean the naturalist? The one who carried dead fish around in his suitcase and kept a jackal in his rooms?”

  “That’s the one. You remember Matthew Arnold, don’t you?”

  She said she did.

  “Well, Frank Buckland was Matthew Arnold’s father’s sister’s husband’s brother’s son, so that made them almost kin. See?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Talbert squinted at a red geranium in the corner of the porch. “Didn’t your brother,” he said slowly, “marry his great-uncle’s son’s wife’s second cousin?”

  She clapped her hands over her eyes and thought hard. “He did,” she finally said. “Talbert, I think you have made a non sequitur but I’m not at all positive.”

  “Well it’s all the same thing, really.”

  She said anybody who could straighten out the Arnolds and Bucklands in one breath deserved either some kind of plaque or to be shut up. In an asylum, she added. “Furthermore, Talbert,” she said, “I have done a little more than dabble in your subject for over fifteen years, and I have so far failed to see any connection with Maycomb, Alabama.”

  “That’s because you haven’t looked,” he said.

  “Well, I must confess that I did not have Maycomb on my mind when exploring the Oxford Movement.”

  “You and Mr. Hackett reminded me vividly of it this morning,” said Talbert. “I’ll betcha it began just like that.”

  She told Talbert that the starting whistle for the Oxford Movement was blown by the Rev. John Keble on July 14, 1833, in a sermon entitled National Apostasy, a copy of which lay somewhere in her apartment in New York; she would be delighted to mail it to him for his inspection, and she challenged him to find anything in it that could possibly remind him of this morning’s proceedings. She spoke harshly, because in the deepest recesses of her consciousness she knew she was on losing ground: this boy was somehow outrageously right, insanely correct in his comparisons. She crushed viciously a sudden impulse to regard the Noetic brethren as a sextet of fiddlers with the Provost of Oriel calling the tune.

  “—somebody in Maycomb who’s really the living counter part of every Victorian who drew a breath. You remember old Dean Stanley, don’t you?”

  “I’m sorry, Talbert?”

  “You remember old Dean Stanley, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” The absent-minded, fluff-haired little clergyman and his stalwart Lady Augusta drifted gently into her mind, and she braced herself for Talbert’s remarks.

  “Doesn’t he remind you of Mr. Finckney Sewell?”

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  “Oh you know, when Stanley was Dean of Westminster he dug up nearly everybody in the Abbey looking for James the Second, or was it James the First?”

  “Oh my God,” she said. During the depression, Mr. Fink Sewell, a Maycomb resident long noted for his independence of mind, disentombed his own grandfather and extracted all his gold teeth to pay off a mortgage. When the sheriff apprehended him for grave-robbery and gold-hoarding, Mr. Fink demurred on the theory that if his own granddaddy wasn’t his, whose was he? The sheriff said old Mr. M.F. Sewell was in the public domain, but Mr. Fink said huffily he supposed it was his lot, his granddaddy, and his teeth, and declined forthwith to be arrested. The consensus of opinion in Maycomb was that Mr. Fink was an honorable man, he was trying his best to pay his debts, and he remained unmolested by the law.

  “Of course, Dean Stanley had the highest historical motives for his excavations,” she said, and planted her feet firmly on the floor lest she should rise to the ceiling and fly away.

  “Yes,” replied Talbert, “but their minds worked exactly alike. You can’t deny he invited every heretic he could lay his hands on to preach in the Abbey. You remember how he supported Bishop Colenso.”

  She remembered. Bishop Colenso, whose views on everything were considered unsound in that day, was the little dean’s particular pet, and when the Bishop was in danger of being unfrocked, Stanley made a ringing Convocation speech in his defense, asking that body was it aware that Colenso was the only colonial bishop who had bothered to translate the Bible into Zulu, which was rather more than the rest had done.

  “Mr. Fink was just like him,” said Talbert. “Mamma says one night in church he testified how liquor had ruined him just to help out the drys, and she says he never touched a drop in his life. She says he subscribed to The Wall Street Journal in the middle of the depression and dared anybody to say a word about it. Mr. Jeddo at the post office nearly had a spasm every time he put the mail up.”

  She stared at Talbert. The Wades had been friends of her family for generations—almost kin, she reflected wryly. The mind, the heart, the actions of any given Wade were as predictable to her as the days of the week: all Wades followed a tribal trail of integrity, dullness, and cotton-buying. Talbert was some antic mutation.

  “—just like him,” Talbert was saying. “Or take Harriet Martineau—”

  Her mind leapt frantically to the Lake District, hovered a while, and settled with uncertainty upon the works of Mrs. Humphry Ward. “Didn’t Mrs. Humphry Ward say she never could remember whether Miss Martineau was a mesmeristic atheist or an atheistic mesmerist?” she asked, trying to get back into the swim of things.

  “I don’t know, but do you remember Mrs. E.C.B. Franklin?”

  She did, and groped through the years for a comparison. History is comparatively silent on Miss Martineau’s accoutrements, but Mrs. E.C.B.’s were easy to remember: crocheted tam, crocheted dress through which peeped pink crocheted drawers, and crocheted stockings. Every Saturday Mrs. E.C.B. walked three miles to town from her farm, which was called Cape Jessamine Copse. Mrs. E.C.B. wrote poetry; so did Harriet Martineau.

  Talbert said, “Remember the minor women poets?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Mrs. E.C.B. was all of ’em rolled into one.”

  “Yes, Talbert.”

  When she was a child she devilled for a while at the Maycomb County Tribune office and witnessed several altercations, including the last, between Mrs. E.C.B. and Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood was an old-time printer and stood for no nonsense. He worked all day at a vast black linotype, refreshing himself at intervals from a gallon jug containing harmless cherry wine. One Saturday Mrs. E.C.B. stalked into the office with an effusion Mr. Underwood said he refused to disgrace the Tribune with: it was a cow obituary in verse, beginning,