Read it through once

—She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen, even though you prove that a bed in those days was as rare as a motorcar is now and that its carvings were the wonder of seven parishes. In old age she takes up with gospellers (one stayed with her at New Place and drank a quart of sack the town council paid for but in which bed he slept it skills not to ask) and heard she had a soul. She read or had read to her his chapbooks preferring them to the _Merry Wives_ and, loosing her nightly waters on the jordan, she thought over _Hooks and Eyes for Believers’ Breeches_ and _The most Spiritual Snuffbox to Make the Most Devout Souls Sneeze_. Venus has twisted her lips in prayer. Agenbite of inwit: remorse of conscience. It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.