“I withdraw my invitation, you need not come at all.”
“Of course I shall come. And what is the name of the thing? Christian Science? I’ll get it up. You know I’d do anything on earth you asked me, though you treat me like a dog.”
“At least you snatch an occasional bone,” she smiled as he mumbled her hand.
Margaret sent for Mary Baker Eddy’s “Science and Health; with a Key to the Scriptures,” and spent the emptiest two hours she could remember in trying to master the viewpoint of the book, the essential dogma. Failing completely she flung it to Peter Kennedy, who read aloud to her sentence after sentence as illuminative as these:
“‘Destructive electricity is not the offspring of infinite good.’ Who the devil said it was?”
“Hush, go on. There must be something more in it than that.” He turned to the title-page, “‘Printed and published at Earlswood’? No, my mistake—at Boston. ‘Christian Science rationally explains that all other pathological methods are the fruits of human faith in matter, in the working, not of spirit, but of the fleshly mind, which must yield to Science.’ Don’t knit your brows. What’s the good of swotting at it? Let’s say Abracadabra to her and see what happens.”
“What an indolent man you are. Is that the way you worked at your examination?”
“I qualified.”
“I suppose that was the height of your ambition?”
“You don’t give a man much encouragement to be ambitious.”