Elsie did not reply at once. Her younger brother was growing into the habit of saying unexpected things. Once after he had left the breakfast table, she had heard her father say to her mother that he had genius. Elsie was not positive as to all that genius comprised; but she at once decided that if she did not possess genius she did not wish genius. However she packed herself off to her room and thought further about this unpleasant parental discrimination.
"If he has genius," she said finally, "at least he did not get it from them," and there was a triumph in her eye. "I see not the slightest sign of genius in either of them: he must have gotten it from our grandparents—never from them!"
From that moment she had begun to oppose her mind to his mind as a superior working instrument in a practical world. Whenever he put forth a fancy, she put forth a fact; and the fact was meant to extinguish the fancy as a muffler puts out a candle. After a moment she now replied—with a mind that had repudiated genius:—
"Nothing is said in the New Testament, my child, about cake. The only thing mentioned is loaves and fishes. But they do seem to have done an unconscionable amount of dining on bread and fish!" and Elsie had her own satirical laugh at the table customs of ancient Palestine as viewed from the Kentucky standard of the nineteenth century.
The boy before replying deliberated as always.
"They may not have had cake, but they had meat: because they said he sat with sinners at meat. I wonder why it was always the sinners who got the meat!"
Elsie could offer no personal objection to this: Providence had ordained her to dwell in the tents of flesh herself.
"How could they feed five thousand people on five loaves and two fishes? How could they? At one of those fish dinners!"
"They did it!" said Elsie flatly. She saw the whole transaction with brilliant clearness—saw to the depths of the painted curtain. It was as naturally fact as the family four of them at breakfast that morning, fed on home-smoked sausages and perfectly digestible buckwheat cakes.
"And twelve baskets of crumbs! That makes it worse! With bread for thousands everywhere, why pick up crumbs?"