ttle 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.

But she meant kindly by Leam when she took her from the loneliness of
her father's house, and her very sharpness and prickly spiritualism
were for the child's enduring good. Her attempts, however, to make
Leam regard mamma in heaven as in any wise different from mamma on
earth were utterly abortive. Leam's imagination could not compass the
thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated. Mamma, if mamma at all, was
mamma as she had known her; and if as she had known her, then she was
unhappy and desolate, seeing what a wicked thing this was that papa
had done. She clung to this point as tenaciously as she clung to
her love; and nothing that Mrs. Corfield, or even Alick, could say
weakened by one line her belief in mamma's angry sorrow and the
saints' potent and sometimes peccant humanity.

Among other scientific appliances at Steel's Corner was a small
off-kind of laboratory for Alick and his mother, to prevent their
troubling the doctor and to enable them to help him when necessary: it
was an auxiliary fitted up in what was rightfully the stick-house. The
sticks had had to make way for retorts and crucibles, and as yet no
harm had come of it, though the servants said they lived in terror of
their lives, and the neighbors expected daily to hear that the inmates
of Steel's Corner had been blown into the air. Into this evil-smelling
and unbeautiful place Leam was introduced with infinite reluctance
on her own part. The bad smell made her sick, she said, turning round
disdainfully on Alick, and she did not wonder now at anything he might
say or do if he could bear to live in such a horrid place as this.

When he showed off a few simple experiments to amuse her--made crystal
trees, a shower of snow, a heavy stone out of two empty-looking
bottles, spilt mercury and set her to gather it up again, showed her
prisms, and made her look through a bit of tourmaline, and in every
way conceivable to him strewed the