"How could I ever have stood it as long as I did! Mother pecked at my cheek and, without turning a hair, asked me was I coming home at last (to be a young lady of the house I suppose!) or did I mean to go on wasting the Lord's time? Wasting the Lord's time! I replied that if she was alluding to my work and to my legal studies—which together occupied me from ten to sixteen hours a day—wasting the Lord's time wasn't the picnic it sounded like. She muttered something about the wages of sin being death! 'Oh, no,' I said, 'I get a very fat salary from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.' I mentioned the exact figure—the amount quite made Emily sit up!—and I added that Mrs. Jerome, my friend as well as my employer, had undertaken to advance my career.
"Well, it seemed to me that this piece of news stumped mother a bit, although she closed her eyes in that trance-like, oblivious way of hers and affected never to have heard of a Mrs. Jerome. Perhaps she really hadn't. Nobody has ever fathomed the bottomless ignorance of the Barr mind."
"Nobody could—not even God!" said Robert.
Janet nodded and went on:
"Don't forget that the Barrs are inordinately vain and aggressively jealous of the things they don't know. This is the fact that makes their ignorance sublime! Take Emily. I got her to talk about herself for a while. She is now one of the head teachers in a public high school. Her devotion to her business is pathetic. She teaches, eats, sleeps—and teaches! Once in a while she shops or sews. These acts complete the cycle of her life from day to day, from year to year. No books, no concerts, no theatres, no travel, no meditation, no self-training, no real companionship with equals or superiors—never one piercing or shattering experience of novelty—nothing that might make the pulse go fast or the heart beat high. 'But how can you teach them anything real, anything about life?' I maliciously asked her."
"'Anything real!' she sneered. 'I suppose you mean romantic adventures! Well, teaching is real enough for me. I study the science of pedagogy every night of the week. And when I want to learn anything more about life, I read the Saturday Evening Post!'
"Yes, Robert; it sounds like a line from The Old Homestead. But that's exactly what she said."
"I don't doubt it," said Robert. "I know the Barrs of Brooklyn. I've met them in every part of the United States, and one runs across them even in Europe. Age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite monotony. As on creation's day, so they'll remain till the trump of doom."
"Of course, Mother isn't as stupid as Emily, not by half," said Janet. "Her behavior at parting convinces me that she really does have an inkling of who Mrs. Jerome is and of how my position near this influential lady sends my stock up in the world of cash realities. When I left, she didn't peck at my cheek as at first. No, she kissed me almost affectionately and said, in a tone so relenting that I'm sure Emily was greatly shocked: 'Now that you've found the way back, my child, come and see us again soon.' And I had always believed that Mother's moral and religious prejudices were incorruptible—absolutely money-proof, if nothing else in this age was! It was quite a blow to me."
"Never mind," rejoined Robert. "We're all easily taken in by other people's moral counterfeit. Haven't you observed that it's usually a Barr who circulates the Biblical saying that a man cannot serve both God and Mammon? Yet, though too modest to acknowledge it, the Barrs themselves accomplish this miracle daily. It's precisely the Barrs who, in their heart of hearts, worship these two deities as one."