"Oh, no; the poor wretch was only the victim of some ailment," said our Doctor, charitably. "There must have been something very much the matter with Calvin, too. I know I could have cured Schopenhauer of his pessimism if he had let me put him on a wholesome regimen."
The Laird probably did not know who Schopenhauer was; but the audacity of the new school was altogether too much for him.
"I—I suppose," he said, stammering in his amazement, "ye would have taken Joan of Arc, and treated her as a lunatic?"
"Oh, no; not as a confirmed lunatic," he answered, quite simply. "But the diagnosis of that case is obvious; I think she could have been cured. All that Joanna Southcote wanted was a frank physician."
The Laird rose and went forward to where Mary Avon was standing at her easel. He had had enough. The criticism of landscape painting was more within his compass.
"Very good—very good," says he, as if his whole attention had been occupied by her sketching. "The reflections on the water are just fine. Ye must let me show all your sketches to Tom Galbraith before ye go back to the south."
"I hear you have been talking about the mysteries of existence," she says, with a smile.
"Oh, ay, it is easy to talk," he says, sharply—and not willing to confess that he has been driven away from the field. "I am afraid there is an unsettling tendency among the young men of the present day—a want of respect for things that have been established by the common sense of the world. Not that I am against all innovation. No, no. The world cannot stand still. I myself, now; do ye know that I was among the first in Glasgow to hold that it might be permissible to have an organ to lead the psalmody of a church?"
"Oh, indeed," says she, with much respect.
"That is true. No, no; I am not one of the bigoted. Give me the Essentials, and I do not care if ye put a stone cross on the top of the church. I tell ye that honestly; I would not object even to a cross on the building if all was sound within."