The Strength of God - Page 2

little leaded panes, was a
design showing the Christ laying his hand upon the head
of a child. One Sunday morning in the summer as he sat
by his desk in the room with a large Bible opened
before him, and the sheets of his sermon scattered
about, the minister was shocked to see, in the upper
room of the house next door, a woman lying in her bed
and smoking a cigarette while she read a book. Curtis
Hartman went on tiptoe to the window and closed it
softly. He was horror stricken at the thought of a
woman smoking and trembled also to think that his eyes,
just raised from the pages of the book of God, had
looked upon the bare shoulders and white throat of a
woman. With his brain in a whirl he went down into the
pulpit and preached a long sermon without once thinking
of his gestures or his voice. The sermon attracted
unusual attention because of its power and clearness.
"I wonder if she is listening, if my voice is carrying
a message into her soul," he thought and began to hope
that on future Sunday mornings he might be able to say
words that would touch and awaken the woman apparently
far gone in secret sin.

The house next door to the Presbyterian Church, through
the windows of which the minister had seen the sight
that had so upset him, was occupied by two women. Aunt
Elizabeth Swift, a grey competent-looking widow with
money in the Winesburg National Bank, lived there with
her daughter Kate Swift, a school teacher. The school
teacher was thirty years old and had a neat
trim-looking figure. She had few friends and bore a
reputation of having a sharp tongue. When he began to
think about her, Curtis Hartman remembered that she had
been to Europe and had lived for two years in New York
City. "Perhaps after all her smoking means nothing," he
thought. He began to remember that when he was a
student in college and occasionally read novels, good
although somewhat worldly women, had smoked through the
pages of a book that had once fallen into his hands.
With a rush of new determination he worked on his
sermons all through the week and forgot, in his zeal to
reach the ears and the soul of this new listener, both
his embarrassment in the pulpit and the necessity of
prayer in the study on Sunday mornings.

Reverend Hartman's experience with women had been
somewhat limited. He was the son of a wagon maker from
Muncie, Indiana, and had worked his way through
college. The daughter of the underwear manufacturer had
boarded in a house where he lived during his school
days and he had married her after a formal and
prolonged courtship, carried on for the most part by
the girl herself. On his marriage day the underwear
manufacturer had given