"Ah, but there! Might it not—I have tested, I fear it would, I ask your better intuition—might not the attempt, if made seriously, defeat its end by rousing that loyalty, giving perhaps direction and opportunity to that—that inflexibility?"
"It might."
Thaddeus lifted a neatly gloved hand, and cane swinging between the fingers.
"To be flexible, to adapt oneself. There are so many doors, it is well not to be too absolutely one kind of key. I have heard a phrase, which appears to be a recent discovery—this phrase, 'The survival of the fittest.' It was explained to me, who am not profound, I confess. Dear me, no; nor a reader of new books. But I understood it to mean the survival of that which fits, the introduction of order by the elimination of the disorderly, of the—a—antagonistic, and so the final result of a race and a world to fit each other like hand and glove. A happy consummation."
"But Helen—"
"Exactly. Helen's ancestors—my own, too; how singular! They cultivated a characteristic—a tendency to martyrdom. I believe a certain Bourn was put to death in the sixteenth century for obdurate persistence in a proscribed opinion. Probably later, in New England, some of them were by their neighbors said to be 'sot.' My brother was an obdurately unhappy person."
"But this Morgan Map?"
"An aboriginal, an anachronism. He belongs in the primeval wilderness with other—pardon me—brutes. His father had a singular opinion of him—a—that reminds me; he had a very singular opinion, very singular."
Thaddeus mused a moment.
"Mrs. Mavering, will you dine with us on Wednesday?"