Missy: A Novel

by Miriam Coles Harris

"Indeed! That seems inexplicable. I have always felt these things could be accounted for, if one were inclined to look into it. It must be the result of something abnormal, you know. If we could look into the matter, I am sure we should find the monastic idea had a physical basis."

"Indeed!" said Miss Varian, tartly. "Well, I shouldn't have thought it had anything of the kind. No more than that the culinary idea had a spiritual basis."

"I have always thought," remarked Mrs. Smatter, ignoring the interruption, "that science would do well to study individual cases of this kind, to ascertain the cause of the mental bias. It would be useful to know the reason of the imperfect development of the brain, for instance, of this young man, who represents a class becoming, I am told, quite numerous. Do you remember, dear Mrs. Varian, any accident in childhood—any fall?"

"I really think you've got beyond your depth," cried Miss Varian, under the spur of indigestion and family feeling. "If I were you I would talk about things I understood a little. St. John Varian isn't down in your books, my dear. You can't take him in any more than you can the planet Jupiter, and you'd better not try."

"Indeed," said Mrs. Smatter, a little uneasy. "Is he so very remarkable an entity?"

"I don't know anything about his entity, but he has a good brain of his own, if you want to know that, and he didn't fall down stairs when he was a child, any more than St. Charles Borromeo, or St. Francis Xavier, or Lacordaire did. But then, perhaps you think they did, if it were only looked into. Fancy what a procession of them, bumping down the stairs of time, or tumbling out of trees of knowledge that they'd been forbidden to climb up."

Missy laughed, a little hysterically, and that irritated Miss Varian, whose indigestion was really very bad, and who was naturally opposed to Missy, and who was ashamed to find herself tackling her guest in this way and upholding the unpardonable step of St. John in the hearing of his mother, who was to blame for it. It was exasperating, and she didn't know whom to hit, or rather, whom not to hit, she was so out of patience with everybody.

"If you'd give up the phosphates," she said, "and inquire into the way he was brought up, you might get more satisfaction. How he was drilled and drilled and made to read saints' lives, and told legends of the martyrs when he was going to bed, and made to believe that all that was nice and jolly in life was to be given up almost before you got it, and that all the sins in the decalogue were to be confessed, almost before you'd committed them; if you'd look into this, you might get a little light upon your subject."

"Ah!" said Mrs. Smatter, interested, "perhaps that might account—"

"Aunt Harriet," cried Missy, getting up, and letting her work fall on the floor—spools, thimble and scissors dispersing themselves in corners—"Aunt Harriet, there is a limit—"