First Sentence

"It rained the day of the funeral; a day to end all days; the skies leaden, the wind, rain driven, and when she got home she was chilled to the bone, wisps of the service clinging to her like some eerie mist; the cold, bleak church, the mellifluous flow of the minister's voice, bypassed by personal grief . . . the frailty of life, the inevitability of its end, the resurrection and the life . . . pitched to a sombre note but delivered with perfect self assurance, broken by spasmodic jangles as a door opened, letting in the outside roar of the traffic, the sudden murmured little breaths of sympathy that came in soft jolts against her ear, to shock her out of her unsharable melancholy."