t upon the plan, and there is no use in arguing with her.
She simply looks calm and tells you that you don't know."

I scratched my head and pondered. My younger daughter's plan, as it
had been unfolded to me, was this: She proposed to set up as a
practitioner of Christian Science in partnership with another young
woman of the same faith. They were to cure disease apparently by dint
of assuring their patients that because there is no such thing as
matter, nothing could be the matter with any one. Their instructress,
Mrs. Titus, had demonstrated the truth of this theory by a varied line
of cures, and they had been encouraged by her to go on with the good
work. Had I any objection to the scheme?

"Perhaps I had better talk the matter over with her and try to bring
her to her senses," I remarked.

"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 lo