f rarest grace. Her head had corners, as once
Professor O. S. Fowler told us that a woman's head must have, if she is
to think and act with purpose and precision.

So having evolved this rare beauty of face, feature and bodily grace,
combined with superior strength and vitality, Hypatia took up her
father's work and gave lectures on astronomy, mathematics, astrology and
rhetoric, while he completed his scheme for the transmutation of metals.
Hypatia's voice was flute-like, and used always well within its compass,
so as never to rasp or tire the organs. Theon knew the proper care of
nose and throat, a knowledge which with us moderns is all too rare.
Hypatia told of and practised the vocal ellipse, the pause, the glide,
the slide and the gentle, deliberate tones that please and impress. That
the law of suggestion was known to her was very evident, and certain it
is that she practised hypnotism in her classes, and seemed to know as
much about the origin of the mysterious agent as we do now, even though
she never tagged or labeled it.

One very vital thought she worked out was, that the young mind is
plastic, impressionable and accepts without question all that it is
told. The young receive their ideas from their elders, and ideas once
impressed upon this plastic plate of the mind can not be removed.

Said Hypatia: "Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and
miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most
terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only
through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved
of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as
for a living truth--often more so, since a superstition is so intangible
you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so
is changeable."

Gradually, over the mind of the beautiful and gifted Hypatia, there came
stealing a doubt concerning the value of her own acquirements, since
these were "acquirements," and not evolutions or convictions gathered
from experience, but things implanted upon her plastic mind by her
father.

In this train of thought Hypatia had taken a step in advance of her
father, for he seems to have had a dogmatic belief in a few things
incapable of demonstration; but these things he taught to the plastic
mind, just the same as the things he knew. Theon was a dogmatic liberal.
Possibly the difference between an illiberal Unitarian an