"I hear, Mrs. Varian, that your son is in one of those organizations they call brotherhoods. I should like very much, if you don't mind, if you would tell me something about his youth, and how you brought him up, and what traces you saw of this tendency, and how you account for it." "I don't understand," faltered Mrs. Varian. "Do you mean--his education--or--or--" "I mean," said Mrs. Smatter, "was he physically strong, and properly developed, and did you attend to his diet? I should have thought oatmeal and fish and phosphates might have counteracted this tendency; that is, of course, if you could have anticipated it." "He has always been in very fine health," said the mother. "Indeed! That seems inexplicable. I have always felt these things could be accounted for, if one were inclined to look into it. It _must_ be the result of something abnormal, you know. If we could look into the matter, I am sure we should find the monastic idea had a physical basis." "Indeed!" said Miss Varian, tartly. "Well, I shouldn't have thought it had anything of the kind. No more than that the culinary idea had a spiritual basis." "I have always thought," remarked Mrs. Smatter, ignoring the interruption, "that science would do well to study individual cases of this kind, to ascertain the cause of the mental bias. It would be useful to know the reason of the imperfect development of the brain, for instance, of this young man, who represents a class becoming, I am told, quite numerous. Do you remember, dear Mrs. Varian, any accident in childhood--any fall?" "I really think you've got beyond your depth," cried Miss Varian, under the spur of indigestion and family feeling. "If I were you I would talk about things I understood a little. St. John Varian isn't down in your books, my dear. You can't take him in any more than you can the planet Jupiter, and you'd better not try." "Indeed," said Mrs. Smatter, a little uneasy. "Is he so very remarkable an entity?" "I don't know anything about his entity, but he has a good brain of his own, if you want to know that, and he didn't fall down stairs when he was a child, any more than St. Charles Borromeo, or St. Francis Xavier, or Lacordaire did. But then, perhaps you think they did, if it were only looked into. Fancy what a procession of them, bumping down the stairs of time, or tumbling out of trees of knowledge that they'd been forbidden to climb up." Missy laughed, a little hysterically, and that irritated Miss Varian, whose indigestion was really very bad, and who was naturally opposed to Missy, and who was ashamed to find herself tackling her guest in this way and upholding the unpardonable step of St. John in the hearing of his mother, who was to blame for it. It was exasperating, and she didn't know whom to hit, or rather, whom not to hit, she was so out of patience with everybody.