“Don’t trifle about serious matters, Harry,” said Mrs. Burton, after a hasty but evident search for a reply. “You know that conscience and æsthetic sense lead to correct lives all persons who subject themselves to their influence, and you know that the purest natures are the most susceptible. If men and women, warped and mistrained though their earlier lives may have been, grow into sweetness and light under right incentives, what may not be done with those of whom it was said, ‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven’?”
Mr. Burton instinctively bowed his head at his wife’s last words, but raised it speedily as the lady uttered an opinion which was probably suggested by the holy sentiment she had just expressed.
“Then you allowed them to be dreadfully irreverent in their conversations about sacred things,” said she.
“Really, my dear,” expostulated the victim, “you must charge up some of these faults to the children’s parents. I had nothing to do with the formation of the children’s habits, and their peculiar habit of talking about what you call sacred things is inherited directly from their parents. Their father says he doesn’t believe it was ever intended that mere mention of a man in the Bible should be a patent of sacredness, and Helen agrees with him.”
MRS. BURTON BRUSHED A TINY CRUMB FROM HER ROBE
Mrs. Burton coughed. It is surprising what a multitude of suggestions can be conveyed by a gentle cough.
“I suppose,” she said slowly, as if musing aloud, “that inheritance is the method by which children obtain many objectionable qualities for which they themselves are blamed, poor little things. I don’t know how to sympathize in the least degree with this idea of Tom’s and Helen’s, for the Maytons, and my mother’s family, too, have always been extremely reverent toward sacred things. You are right in laying the fault to them instead of the boys, but I cannot see how they can bear to inflict such a habit upon innocent children and I must say that I can’t see how they can tolerate it in each other.”
Mrs. Burton raised her napkin, and with fastidious solicitude brushed a tiny crumb or two from her robe as she finished this remark. Dear creature! She needed to display a human weakness to convince her husband that she was not altogether too good for earth, and this implication of a superiority of origin, the darling idea of every woman but Eve, answered the purpose. Her spouse endured the infliction as good husbands always do in similar cases, though he somewhat hastily passed his coffee-cup for more sugar, and asked, in a tone in which self-restraint was distinctly perceptible:
“What else, my dear?”