It seemed almost an eternity during which these thoughts passed through her brain, while she stood looking at Mrs. Corfield so intently that the little woman was obliged to lower her eyes. Not that Leam saw her. She was thinking, listening, but not seeing, though her tragic eyes seemed searching Mrs. Corfield's very soul. Then, glancing upward to the sky, she said with an air of self-surrender, which Alick understood if his mother did not, "Yes, I will go with you: mamma says I may."
"It is my belief, Alick," said Mrs. Corfield, when she had left them to prepare for her visit, "that poor child is going crazy, if she is not so already. She always was queer, but she is certainly not in her right mind now. What a shame of Sebastian Dundas to bring her up as he has done, and now to leave her like this! How glad I am I thought of having her at Steel's Corner!"
"Yes, mother, it was a good thing. Just like you, though," said Alick affectionately.
"You must help me with her, Alick," answered his mother. "I have done what I know I ought to do, but she will be an awful nuisance all the same. She is so odd and cold and impertinent, one does not know how to take her."
Alick flushed and turned away his head. "I will take her off your hands as much as I can," he said in a constrained voice.
"That's my dear boy—do," was his mother's unsuspecting rejoinder as Leam came down stairs ready to go.
Steel's Corner was a place of unresting intellectual energies. Dr. Corfield, a man shut up in his laboratory with piles of extracts, notes, arguments, never used, but always to be used, an experimentalist deep in many of the toughest problems of chemical analysis, but neither ambitious nor communicative, was the one peaceable element in the house. To be sure, Alick would have been both broader in his aims and more concentrated in his objects had he been left to himself. As it was, the incessant demands made on him by his mother kept him too in a state of intellectual nomadism; and no one could weary of monotony where Mrs. Corfield set the pattern, unless it was of the monotony of unrest. This perpetual taking up of new subjects, new occupations, made thoroughness the one thing unattainable. Mrs. Corfield was a woman who went in for everything. She was by turns scientific and artistic, a student and a teacher, but she was too discursive to be accurate, and she was satisfied with a proficiency far below perfection. In philosophy she was what might be called a woman of antepenultimates, referring all the more intricate moral and intellectual phenomena to mind and spirit; but she was intolerant of any attempt to determine the causation of her favorite causes, and she derided the modern doctrines of evolution and inherent force as atheistic because materialistic. The two words meant the same thing with her; and the more shadowy and unintelligible people made the causa causarum the more she believed in their knowledge and their piety. The bitterest quarrel she had ever had was with an old friend, an unimaginative anatomist, who one day gravely proved to her that spirits must be mere filmy bags, pear-shaped, if indeed they had any visual existence at all. Bit by bit he eliminated all the characteristics and circumstances of the human form on the principle of the non-survival of the useless and unadaptable. For of what use are shapes and appliances if you have nothing for them to do?—if you have no need to walk, to grasp, nor yet to sit? Of what use organs of sense when you have no brain to which they lead?—when you are substantially all brain and the result independent of the method? Hence he abolished by logical and anatomical necessity, as well as the human form, the human face with eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and by the inexorable necessities of the case came down to a transparent bag, pear-shaped, for the better passage of his angels through the air.
"A fulfillment of the old proverb that extremes meet," he said by way of conclusion. "The beginning of man an ascidian—his ultimate development as an angel, a pear-shaped, transparent bag."
Mrs. Corfield never forgave her old friend, and even now if any one began a conversation on the theory of development and evolution she invariably lost her temper and permitted herself to say rude things. Her idea of angels and souls in bliss was the good orthodox notion of men and women with exactly the same features and identity as they had when in the flesh, but infinitely more beautiful; retaining the Ego, but the Ego refined and purified out of all trace of human weakness, all characteristic passions, tempers and proclivities; and the pear-shaped bag was as far removed from the truth, as she held it, on the one side as Leam's materialistic conception was on the other. The character and condition of departed souls was one of the subjects on which she was very positive and very aggressive, and Leam had a hard fight of it when her hostess came to discuss her mother's present personality and whereabouts, and wanted to convince her of her transformation.
All the same, the little woman was kind-hearted and conscientious, but she was not always pleasant. She wanted the grace and sweetness known genetically as womanliness, as do most women who hold the doctrine of feminine moral supremacy, with base man, tyrant, enemy and inferior, holding down the superior being by force of brute strength and responsible for all her faults. And she wanted the smoothness of manner known as good breeding. Though a gentlewoman by birth, she gave one the impression of a pert chambermaid matured into a tyrannical landlady.