"Rather a nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them."
"Let's see." Gloria moved after him and the other two followed her. "Let's sit out here," she suggested. "I like it much better."
Anthony and Dick converted a long box into a backrest and found a board dry enough for Gloria to sit on. Anthony dropped down beside her and with some effort Dick hoisted himself onto an apple-barrel near them.
"Tana went to sleep in the porch hammock," he remarked. "We carried him in and left him next to the kitchen stove to dry. He was drenched to the skin."
"That awful little man!" sighed Gloria.
"How do you do!" The voice, sonorous and funereal, had come from above, and they looked up startled to find that in some manner Maury had climbed to the roof of the shed, where he sat dangling his feet over the edge, outlined as a shadowy and fantastic gargoyle against the now brilliant sky.
"It must be for such occasions as this," he began softly, his words having the effect of floating down from an immense height and settling softly upon his auditors, "that the righteous of the land decorate the railroads with bill-boards asserting in red and yellow that 'Jesus Christ is God,' placing them, appropriately enough, next to announcements that 'Gunter's Whiskey is Good.'"
There was gentle laughter and the three below kept their heads tilted upward.
"I think I shall tell you the story of my education," continued Maury, "under these sardonic constellations."
"Do! Please!"
"Shall I, really?"
They waited expectantly while he directed a ruminative yawn toward the white smiling moon.
"Well," he began, "as an infant I prayed. I stored up prayers against future wickedness. One year I stored up nineteen hundred 'Now I lay me's.'"
"Throw down a cigarette," murmured some one.
A small package reached the platform simultaneously with the stentorian command: "Silence! I am about to unburden myself of many memorable remarks reserved for the darkness of such earths and the brilliance of such skies."
Below, a lighted match was passed from cigarette to cigarette. The voice resumed: "I was adept at fooling the deity. I prayed immediately after all crimes until eventually prayer and crime became indistinguishable to me. I believed that because a man cried out 'My God!' when a safe fell on him, it proved that belief was rooted deep in the human breast. Then I went to school. For fourteen years half a hundred earnest men pointed to ancient flint-locks and cried to me: 'There's the real thing. These new rifles are only shallow, superficial imitations.' They damned the books I read and the things I thought by calling them immoral; later the fashion changed, and they damned things by calling them 'clever'.