He stumbled into the house and into the dining-room, where he kept a little black-bound Bible once belonging to his great-grandfather.

He had thumbed it well in past years, searching it for passages of violence and denunciation.

Now holy superstition seized him in the midst of the work of the devil, surrounding him with an almost medieval instinct.

He seized the ancient book, as it were to deliver its incantations against everyone destroying his peace, stealing from him that which he prized beyond all earthly things.
Take this woman away from him, this child-wife from his sixty-five years, and what was left for him?
She was the garden of spring in which his old age roamed at ease luxuriously.

She was the fruit of the tree of pleasure.