"It was odd," said Ann, "that in public he was such a fighter, for in his home life, if ever man carried in his right hand gentle peace, it was my Father. There was a time, when Mark and I first grew up, that we thought we knew infinitely more about everything in heaven and earth than our parents. There was a time when Father's beliefs filled me with a kind of tender scorn: they were so hopelessly out of date. I used to argue with him in my pert way that Free Will and Election could not be reconciled, and he would reply, with a twinkle, 'Ann, I sometimes think you are a very ignorant creature. Give me another cup of tea.' I remember Father's _innocence_ amused us very much. He was so far away from the ugliness and the vulgarity and the idiotic smartness of modern life. He once heard Robbie singing an absurd song, and asked him to repeat the words--I forget what they were, something very silly and rather funny about: 'How often to myself I've said, Cheer up, Cully, you'll soon be dead, A short life but a gay one.' Father listened and said gravely, 'If the wretched fellow had had any hope of an after life...' "And we said, 'Isn't Father _quaint_!'" "And when he was no longer there to stand up for his old-fashioned beliefs there wasn't one of us but would have died gladly for those same beliefs because they had been his.... When Robbie got the cable of his death he wrote from India: 'The best man in Scotland is gone--now he knows what his beliefs meant to all of us'; and Davie, that advanced young thinker, once came back from hearing a preacher of renown, and said fiercely, 'No, I didn't like him. He _sneered at the Shorter Catechism_.'" CHAPTER XVIII "Here's a nice state of things," said Ann. "Is anything wrong?" asked her mother. "Well, I don't know whether you would call it wrong or right. Mr. Philip Scott sends me back my MS., with his criticism of it. I agree with most of the things he says: my language is too incorrigibly noble, my quotations _are_ very frequent----" "But if they're good quotations," Mrs. Douglas interrupted. "Oh, they're good quotations. 'It was the best butter,' as the poor March Hare said. But what he objects to most is the sweetness of it. He says, 'Put more acid into it.'" "Into me, does he mean?" "I suppose so. Mr. Scott evidently finds you insipid. We must change that at once. Tell me, now, about all the people you hated and who hated you." Mrs. Douglas looked bewildered, and more than a little indignant. "Nonsense, Ann. I'm sure I'm very glad to hear you have made me sweet--anything else would have been most undutiful; and as for hating people, I never was any good at that. I couldn't keep up grudges, though I was sometimes very angry at people. I dare say it was a weakness in my nature. But I think, if Mr. Scott is to be allowed to criticise, I might be allowed to read my own _Life_."