health were potent to subdue any sort of pains from indigestion to a
raging tooth, then a ten-dollar binding super-added ought, of a surety,
to be able to cope with tuberculosis or the hookworm. Therefore she had
chosen to fortify herself once and for all.

Meanwhile, the little table beside her bed-head was fast heaping itself
with small books of devotion, books from which the old-time cross was
conspicuously absent. At present, it was taxing all her ingenuity, all
the fervour of her new belief, to make its tenets tally with her young
son's attitude concerning colic, doubtless because, at some point or
other, he had escaped from perfect contact with the All-Mind, the
Healer. Some noxious claim or other still held good over him, despite
her efforts to eradicate its malignant influence. It was disappointing.
Still, as yet she was merely a novice in the great order of the new
religion; and she only wondered at the swift hold her untrained mind
had gained upon the pliant body of her husband.

Katharine smiled contentedly above her open book. Strange that she ever
could have cherished the false notion that she and Scott were alien in
their natures! Rather not! They both were ultra-scientific,
fundamentally alike. As yet, of course, Scott did not spell his science
with an X; but that was bound to come. How could it be otherwise,
indeed, when his mere carnal appetite for bacon and dry toast had
multiplied itself by ten, as result of her devotion to the book now
lying open on her knee? It would be so very good, when she had brought
her own husband to her way of thinking. For Scott was still her
husband, still in a sense her property; therefore he still was dear to
her, after her selfish fashion. His acceptance of her standards would
be infinitely good; infinitely better would be the knowledge that she
herself had converted him to their acceptation. And after Scott?

Katharine's prominent and shallow eyes grew hazy with the greatness of
her thoughts, the while she meditated upon the wider field of labour
offered her in the person of Reed Opdyke. Glorious indeed would be the
conversion and the consequent cure of a desperate case like that! It
would be a brilliant vindication of her science from the slanders of
that decreasing number who persisted in ignoring the prefatory X.

Katharine's eyes grew yet more dreamy, above the open pages of her
book. If courage were only hers, and patience, it all would come to her
in the fulnes