"Quite so—but she knew she was cured, remember. She felt it. The rest of us didn't.
"Now let's go a step farther, if you don't mind. Beatrix tells me that the Almighty God, the creator of the universe, is the father of the son of a young Jewess, and sacrificed his son in order to save the world. This seems to me fantastic, frankly. But mind you, aunty, though I know that druggist wasn't Charley Ross, and though I know that the miraculous baths of Lourdes didn't cure poor Marie Tremplin of her tuberculosis, I can't say that what Beatrix assures me she knows about the Deity isn't so! It appears to me quite incapable of demonstration, but maybe it all happened as she says. Only I don't believe with her that she knows it. I say she believes it. If it helps her, as she says it does, to be the good and lovely girl she is, all right. It might help Parrott to stand straight to think he was Napoleon. All right."
"That's pragmatism," I suggested.
"Oh, well," he said, with one of his curious old smiles, "they call it different things different years, I suppose."
He drew himself up, and I could see something was coming.
"Now, aunty, attend to me. I couldn't put Beatrix in an asylum for what I and many, many others consider her delusion, could I?"
"Why, Will, of course not!"
"No, nor Marie Tremplin."
"Equally of course not. She has a right to her miracle, legally, I suppose, as well as Beatrix."
"Precisely. Well, here comes along Absolom Vail, and says he's had a miracle, too. He hasn't millions of people behind him, like Beatrix, nor thousands like Marie, nor even half a dozen, as our old Esther had—she converted all the servants and us children. He has only one—himself. A poor miracle, perhaps, but his own. And Barkington lands him in an asylum. The day of miracles is over."