“I thought you might have had to pay for it, yourself. I thought—”
“Well, say. Can you tie that. Can you, now.”
They were not looking at one another, standing face to face. To another they must have looked like two monks met during the hour of contemplation in a garden path. “I just thought that I . . .”
“Where do you live?” she said. “In the country? Well, say. What’s your name?”
“It’s not McEachern,” he said. “It’s Christmas.”
“Christmas? Is that your name? Christmas? Well, say.”
On the Saturday afternoons during and after adolescence he and the other four or five boys hunted and fished. He saw girls only at church, on Sunday. They were associated with Sunday and with church. So he could not notice them. To do so would be, even to him, a retraction of his religious hatred. But he a
