"You are an angel, and will never be anything else to me," I responded, stroking her hair.
She lay still for a moment, happy but pensive. "She shall do whatever she pleases; only it is a very much easier matter for you to be virtuous and to say, "Let her study medicine," than for me."
"I have not said so, dearest."
"You have thought so, though. You do not need to speak to have me know when you are thinking things. No man can possibly conceive what it means to a mother to have a daughter a radiant beauty and peculiar."
"I dare say not," I murmured, humbly.
"Especially," she continued, reflectively, "when you consider that, though society is foolish, there is really nothing else at present to take its place to give a girl what nothing else is likely to give her--I do not say nothing else can give it to her, but nothing else is in the least likely to; and when you consider the vast number of wives and mothers who have been through it all when they were young, and are charming and--yes, Fred, sensible, intelligent women to-day. I don"t pretend that I myself am half what I might have been, but I went through it all as a girl without becoming absolutely vapid and volatile. Didn"t I, dear?"
"You certainly did, Josephine. If Winona turns out your equal I shall be more than satisfied."
"Thank you, dear, but you mustn"t say it. I do wish her to have more mind. My mind was more or less neglected; but, on the other hand, Fred, I never had the opportunity to be peculiar, for there was no chance to be in those days. Now the disease is liable to break out in any family. All we can do, Fred, is to remember that we are growing old, and to trust that the world of to-day is wiser than we."
"Amen!" I murmured.
And yet the consciousness that Josephine pa.s.sed through it all and is what she is, makes me feel a little doubtful still on the score of the new dispensation, in spite of the mushrooms with rich gray gravy.
VII
My daughter Winona has become a Christian Scientist, and Josephine says I have only myself to blame in that I encouraged her to model herself upon Miss Jacket. This strikes me as a little harsh, seeing that Miss Jacket, M.D., is a regular pract.i.tioner in the allopathic line, whereas Winona declares that the science of medicine is all nonsense, for the excellent reason that there is no such thing as disease. When I used this argument as a defence, Josephine regarded me scornfully, and remarked that the pair were practically one in ideas, and that it was futile of me to split straws on such a point. Ye G.o.ds and little fishes! Is it, forsooth, splitting straws to maintain that there can be no sympathy of soul between a woman doctor who takes you at your word and administers castor-oil to cure your stomach-ache and one who elevates her nose and vows that you haven"t one?
"You can"t make fish of one and flesh of another," continued my wife, majestically. "The mischief was done when they walked arm-in-arm for weeks together while they were becoming intimate. It makes little difference, it seems to me, as to the precise nature of the development. If Winona hadn"t embraced (as she calls it) Christian Science, she would in all probability have worn bloomers, in which case I should not have held Dr. Cora Jacket guiltless merely because that young woman continued to wear petticoats. Neither do I in the present emergency. Who was it introduced Winona to Mrs. t.i.tus, I should like to know?"
"Was Miss Jacket responsible for that?" I inquired, respectfully, not venturing to contest further the soundness of my wife"s logic in her present excited frame of mind.
"She was indeed, and it is very little consolation to me that she professes to be sorry for it now." Josephine tapped her foot with a worried air, which found voice presently in a laugh born of sheer desperation. "Isn"t it perfectly ludicrous, Fred? Do you realize what the child wishes to do?"
"I understood you to state that she wishes to enter upon a crusade to show that all our aches and pains are hallucinations. There ought to be a fortune in that, my dear, compared with which the profits from David"s electrical discovery will pale into insignificance."
"This is no laughing matter, Fred. She is intensely in earnest; her heart is set upon the plan, and there is no use in arguing with her.
She simply looks calm and tells you that you don"t know."
I scratched my head and pondered. My younger daughter"s plan, as it had been unfolded to me, was this: She proposed to set up as a pract.i.tioner of Christian Science in partnership with another young woman of the same faith. They were to cure disease apparently by dint of a.s.suring their patients that because there is no such thing as matter, nothing could be the matter with any one. Their instructress, Mrs. t.i.tus, had demonstrated the truth of this theory by a varied line of cures, and they had been encouraged by her to go on with the good work. Had I any objection to the scheme?
"Perhaps I had better talk the matter over with her and try to bring her to her senses," I remarked.
"I wish you joy of the experience," said my wife, with a wry smile.
"She is like a seraph in her serenity, and I might just as well have been talking to a stone wall for all the effect my words seemed to have. Of course you can prevent her; she understands that; but I should like to see you alter her opinion."
I concluded to try. Accordingly, I summoned Winona to the library that evening, and we were closeted with folded doors, as the phrase is, for an hour and a half. Being a father I was desirous naturally to be judicious and yet sympathetic; being a philosopher, I was willing to be enlightened if I was ignorant. My son David had demonstrated to me that a young germ of tuberculosis has all the engaging attractiveness of a six months" old baby; perhaps it had been reserved for my daughter to prove to me that I had never had const.i.tutional headaches. If so, what an amount of unnecessary misery I had undergone from sheer lack of knowledge!
Conventional conceptions are slow to relax their grip even when one"s reason is prepared to discard them as out-worn. I am not giving utterance in this sententious fashion to distrust in allopathy; I simply am thinking of the qualms which persisted in harrowing my soul as I gazed upon my very beautiful daughter, and tried to feel proud that she was endeavoring to do something useful. My a.s.sociations with lovely women are so intimately a.s.sociated with the ball-room floor and the purlieus of polite society, that, in spite of my secret sympathy with the progress of the s.e.x, I could not completely school my mental machinery so as to exclude a lurking regret that such arrant good looks were to be wasted upon people who had nothing the matter with them, and who would, perhaps, be slow in recognizing the fact. I was even weak enough to remark:
"Winona, my dear, you look this evening handsome enough to eat."
As Christian Scientists are said to harbor the belief that, owing to the non-existence of matter, looks of any kind are a delusion and snare, for the reason that individuals do not really exist, but are merely so many reflections of the one eternal and immutable existence, just as the various reflections in a stream are often but the continuous duplication of some single incandescent jet, it was scarcely to be expected that my darling daughter would fall a victim to the lure which I held out to her. She had the goodness to smile a ghost of a smile, but it was evident that the speech interested her very little.
Before settling down to the business in hand I could not help, however, saying to myself that, if I were a young man, I should fall down and worship before this particular shrine, Christian Science and delusion to the contrary notwithstanding. Then I said, with as much cheer as I could muster:
"And so you wish to practise medicine, Winona?"
"Not medicine, father. It is Christian Science."
"Excuse me. But are not Christian Scientists doctors?"
"We do not give medicine."
"But you cure sick people?"
Winona shook her head and smiled sweetly. "There are no sick people,"
she said, with quiet decision.
"Then why are there so many physicians?"
"If people had the requisite faith, there would be no more physicians."
"Only Christian Scientists."
My daughter looked at me no less sweetly because of my taunt, and responded:
"In time we shall all be able to heal ourselves. It is simply a question of strength and degree. Some of us have more power than others at present, but as the world grows the number of those sufficient unto themselves will increase."
"What makes you think so?"
"I know it, father."
"From Mrs. t.i.tus?"
"Mrs. t.i.tus knows it too; but I know it not merely because she knows it, but because I can feel that it is so."
"But, my dear child, surely you do not mean to tell me that if I were to have typhoid fever, I shouldn"t have it?"
"I know that you would think you had it."
"Well, supposing I died, wouldn"t I be dead?"
Winona hesitated for an instant, but it was only in order to avoid committing herself to one heresy while seeking to avoid another. "You would be dead, though perhaps not as we now understand being dead. You would not have died of typhoid fever, but of the belief that you were suffering from typhoid fever induced by the hallucination of error."
"I see," I answered, though to tell the truth I did not, and it was very evident to me that Winona thought so too, for her serene smile revealed just a tinge of amus.e.m.e.nt. Even a real philosopher would be apt to feel nettled were he to suspect that he was making himself ridiculous in the eyes of his most beautiful daughter. I said a little sternly:
"I wish you would explain to me, in the first place, what you mean by saying that I might not be dead as we now understand being dead."
Winona folded her hands. "I said that, father, because we Christian Scientists are not yet certain as to what is the precise nature of death. There are some who deem death also an hallucination, and the apparent annihilation of matter consequent upon it merely a reflex confirmation of the truth that there is no matter, only spirit; and it may well be that as the world grows in faith, death will disappear in that we shall cease to think we see matter. Mrs. t.i.tus holds this view, but I am not yet sufficiently free from error to be sure that I believe it."
"But you are sure you believe that I should not have typhoid fever?"