Quicksand
Twenty-Two
And so in the confusion of seductive repentance Helga Crane was married to the grandiloquent Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green, that rattish yellow man, who had so kindly, so unctuously, proffered his escort to her hotel on the memorable night of her conversion. With him she willingly, even eagerly, left the sins and temptations of New York behind her to, as he put it, “labor in the vineyard of the Lord” in the tiny Alabama town where he was pastor to a scattered and primitive flock. And where, as the wife of the preacher, she was a person of relative importance. Only relative.
Helga did not hate him, the town, or the people. No. Not for a long time.
As always, at first the novelty of the thing, the change, fascinated her. There was a recurrence of the feeling that now, at last, she
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