I thought of her eldest boy, who happened to be ill with mumps. “What, then, is Willy’s mumps,” I said, “if not an affection of the fleshy tissue of his cheeks and neck? Why should he cry with pain, and why should he look so horrid?” She frowned, as if reflecting hard. “When you came in,” she said, “I’d just been holding the thought that he has no body, and I don’t--I really don’t feel any longer that he has mumps. So I don’t worry. And that’s splendid both for him and me.” I saw that it was splendid for her; but how was it splendid for him? I did not ask, however, because she looked so earnest and uplifted, and I was afraid of seeming unkind. The next day I came back again, and said: “I’ve been thinking over your faith, Minna. Candidly, I’ve never seen any one improve so amazingly in health and looks since you’ve had it. But what I’ve been wondering is, whether it’s in the nature of fresh air, hard work, and plain living, or in the nature of a drug or anodyne. Whether it’s prevention, or cure. In fact, whether you could hold it, or ever have held it, unless you had been sick _before_ you held it?” She evidently did not grasp my meaning. I could, of course, have made it plain enough by saying: “Suppose you had not been a self-conscious, self-absorbed, high-strung, anæmic girl, like so many nowadays, quivering at life and Quakers with strong physique and principles; suppose you had been an Italian peasant woman or an English cottage lass, obliged to work and think of others all her time; suppose, in a word, you had not had the chance to be so desperately sensitive and conscious of your body--do you think you would ever have felt the necessity for becoming unconscious of it?” But she looked so serene and puzzled, so corporeally charming on her sofa, that I hadn’t the heart to put it thus brutally; and I merely said: “Do tell me how the idea first came to you?” “It was put there. It could never have come of its own accord.” “No doubt; but what exactly?” She grew rather pink. “It was one evening when Willy--he was only four then--had been very naughty, and Tom” (this was the Quaker) “insisted on my whipping him. I was obliged to, you see, for fear he would do it himself. Poor Willy cried so that I was simply in despair. It hurt me awfully; I remember thinking: ‘Ah! but it’s not really me; not me--not my arm.’ It seemed to me that there was a dreadful unreality about myself; that I was not really doing it, and so I surely could not be hurting him. It was such a comfort--and I wanted comfort.” I felt the sacredness and the pathos of that; I felt, too, that her despair, before that comfort came, had been her farewell to truth; but I would not for the world have said that, nor asked what Willy’s tears had really been, if not real tears. “Yes,” I murmured; “and after that?”