"I wish you joy of the experience," said my wife, with a wry smile. "She is like a seraph in her serenity, and I might just as well have been talking to a stone wall for all the effect my words seemed to have. Of course you can prevent her; she understands that; but I should like to see you alter her opinion."
I concluded to try. Accordingly, I summoned Winona to the library that evening, and we were closeted with folded doors, as the phrase is, for an hour and a half. Being a father I was desirous naturally to be judicious and yet sympathetic; being a philosopher, I was willing to be enlightened if I was ignorant. My son David had demonstrated to me that a young germ of tuberculosis has all the engaging attractiveness of a six months' old baby; perhaps it had been reserved for my daughter to prove to me that I had never had constitutional headaches. If so, what an amount of unnecessary misery I had undergone from sheer lack of knowledge!
Conventional conceptions are slow to relax their grip even when one's reason is prepared to discard them as out-worn. I am not giving utterance in this sententious fashion to distrust in allopathy; I simply am thinking of the qualms which persisted in harrowing my soul as I gazed upon my very beautiful daughter, and tried to feel proud that she was endeavoring to do something useful. My associations with lovely women are so intimately associated with the ball-room floor and the purlieus of polite society, that, in spite of my secret sympathy with the progress of the sex, I could not completely school my mental machinery so as to exclude a lurking regret that such arrant good looks were to be wasted upon people who had nothing the matter with them, and who would, perhaps, be slow in recognizing the fact. I was even weak enough to remark:
"Winona, my dear, you look this evening handsome enough to eat."
As Christian Scientists are said to harbor the belief that, owing to the non-existence of matter, looks of any kind are a delusion and snare, for the reason that individuals do not really exist, but are merely so many reflections of the one eternal and immutable existence, just as the various reflections in a stream are often but the continuous duplication of some single incandescent jet, it was scarcely to be expected that my darling daughter would fall a victim to the lure which I held out to her. She had the goodness to smile a ghost of a smile, but it was evident that the speech interested her very little. Before settling down to the business in hand I could not help, however, saying to myself that, if I were a young man, I should fall down and worship before this particular shrine, Christian Science and delusion to the contrary notwithstanding. Then I said, with as much cheer as I could muster:
"And so you wish to practise medicine, Winona?"
"Not medicine, father. It is Christian Science."
"Excuse me. But are not Christian Scientists doctors?"
"We do not give medicine."
"But you cure sick people?"