There was once a priest with cold, watery¹ eyes, who, in the still of the night, wept cold tears. He wept because the afternoons were warm and long, and he was unable to attain² a complete mystical union with our Lord. Sometimes, near four o'clock, there was a rustle³ of Swede girls along the path by his window, and in their shrill⁴ laughter he found a terrible dissonance that made him pray aloud for the twilight⁵ to come. At twilight the laughter and the voices were quieter, but several times he had walked past Romberg's Drug Store when it was dusk and the yellow lights shone inside and the nickel taps of the soda-fountain were gleaming, and he had found the scent⁶ of cheap toilet soap desperately⁷ sweet upon the air. He passed that way when he returned from hearing confessions⁹ on Saturday nights, and he grew careful to walk on the other side of the street so that the smell of the soap would float upward before it reached his nostrils¹⁰ as it drifted, rather like incense¹¹, toward the summer moon.

 

But there was no escape from the hot madness of four o'clock. From his window, as far as he could see, the Dakota wheat thronged¹² the valley of the Red River. The wheat was terrible to look upon and the carpet pattern to which in agony he bent¹³ his eyes sent his thought brooding through

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