“We ran home, and on the front porch we looked at a small box patchworked with bits of tinfoil collected from chewing-gum wrappers. It was the kind of box wedding rings came in, purple velvet with a minute catch. Jem flicked open the tiny catch. Inside were two scrubbed and polished pennies, one on top of the other.”

“Through all the head-shaking, quelling of nausea and Jem-yelling, I had heard another sound, so low I could not have heard it from the sidewalk. Someone inside the house was laughing.”

“‘You are two young to understand it,’ she said, ‘but sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whiskey bottle in the hand of—oh, of your father.’”

“It was then, I suppose, that Jem and I began to part company. Sometimes I did not understand him, but my periods of bewilderment were short-lived. This was beyond me.”

Previous section Chapters 2 & 3 Next section Chapters 7 & 8

Popular pages: To Kill a Mockingbird

Take a Study Break