"The race is to the
young, Fanny. To the young. And I am old."
She squeezed the frail old arm in hers. "My dear!" she
said. "My dear!" A second breaking of her new resolutions.
One by one, two by two, they straggled in for the Friday
evening service, these placid, prosperous people, not
unkind, but careless, perhaps, in their prosperity.
"He's worth any ten of them," Fanny said hotly to herself,
as she sat in her pew that, after to-morrow, would no longer
be hers. "The dear old thing. `Sex sermons.' And the race
is to the young. How right he is. Well, no one can say I'm
not getting an early start."
The choir had begun the first hymn when there came down the
aisle a stranger. There was a little stir among the
congregation. Visitors were rare. He was dark and very
slim--with the slimness of steel wire. He passed down the
aisle rather uncertainly. A traveling man, Fanny thought,
dropped in, as sometimes they did, to say Kaddish for a
departed father or mother. Then she changed her mind. Her
quick eye noted his walk; a peculiar walk, with a spring in
it.
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