Time Is Noon by Pearl S. Buck Page A

They ran and sang and shouted and played busily, and they could leave her and run out into the village to look for pleasure.
    Now, looking down at the sleeping face, Joan felt again the old dependence on her mother’s mood. Everything was wrong. She turned away frightened, and went softly from the room. The meeting suddenly became a burden to her. It would not be fun. She dreaded it—she did not like to hear sad things told, not even about people heathen and far away. She had not been to a missionary meeting for years, not since she was a little girl too small to leave at home alone. And she dreaded it because her mother had dreaded it always, too, although she made jokes about it. Still it had been one of her tasks, and when it was over she always came home sparkling and laughing and relieved. “There,” she would cry, “I’m done with the heathen for another month!”
    Nevertheless she had always worked steadily, since she was the minister’s wife, at getting together the money the church promised. One hundred dollars each year they promised and the women planned and contrived and gave chicken suppers at which they sold bags and lace-edged handkerchiefs and embroidered towels and knit dishcloths and a score of such small things which they made and bought of each other, although they would have preferred neither to make nor to buy. Old Mrs. Mark regularly bought the same bag each year and donated it the next and bought it again, without pretense, and called it “my missionary bag.” … Her mother, Joan perceived with surprise as she went slowly downstairs, had done many things she hated.
    At the door she came upon Rose, dressed in white linen and with her wide straw hat already on her head. “Shall I go with you, Joan?” she inquired seriously.
    “If you like,” Joan said. She walked across the lawn beside Rose, constrained. She was somehow very constrained with Rose now. She had not thought much about her these last years. She had been too busy feeling her own growth. But Rose had been growing, too. After the summer it would be her turn to go away to school.
    “What shall you do after the summer, Joan?” Rose asked suddenly, turning her large sweet eyes upon her sister. “What do you plan for your life?”
    Plan? She planned everything. But she answered vaguely, “I don’t know—” She could not tell Rose anything. But then it was true she did not know.
    Besides, they were at the church. Miss Kinney came to them out of the side door, and she was softly anxious, her small nose trembling like a rabbit’s. “I’m always nervous before I speak,” she began breathlessly. “But somehow God gives me strength as I go on. I miss your dear mother. She did cheer me up always at the beginning—she always looked so interested—”
    Under her arm was a portfolio of pictures. She had shown them many times, but still they were pictures of Africa and she had been there. Yes, she had walked among jungle trees and beneath swinging serpents and she had crept out of a hut on a tropical summer’s night and seen the moon red behind palm trees and she had heard the throbbing beat of deep-toned distant drums. Once for five years out of her life she had escaped from this village and from her father and her mother. She said the voice of God called her. No other voice could have enticed her, not love, not lust. But when she was thirty-three, “yet not too old to learn the language,” she always explained, she obeyed God’s call, as she put it, and became a missionary.
    Mr. and Mrs. Kinney had been shocked and deserted in their dignified old house. But they could not in decency protest against God as they had against the voices of young men. Nevertheless they delayed her. They said, “Sarah is impetuous. She decides everything so quickly.” So year after year they delayed her, as they had delayed the two young men who had loved her childish ardent eyes, who came and waited and went away. Yet the parents could not drive