Joel disdained to take up the gauntlet. "Persis, it's clothes." His sister looked him over. Joel was attired in a pair of bathing trunks and a bath towel, the latter festooned gracefully about his body, low enough to show his projecting ribs. "If the style you're wearing at present was ever to get what you'd call popular," she agreed dryly, "I think it would make considerable trouble." Joel again refused to be diverted. "Clothes, Persis, are an invention of the devil. The electricity of the body, instead of passing off into the earth as it would do if we went around the way the Lord intended, is kept pent up in our insides by our clothes, and of course it gets to playing the mischief with all our organs. As old Fuller says, 'He that is proud of the rustling of his silks, like a madman laughs at the rattling of his fetters.'" "The sun is shining right on your bare back," remarked Persis acridly. "According to your ideas yesterday, you'd ought to be ready to drop dead." Joel magnanimously ignored the taunt. Like some greater men, he had discovered that to be true to to-day's vision, one must often violate yesterday's conviction. The charge of inconsistency never troubled him. "Earth and air are stuffed with helpfulness, Persis, and the clothes we wear won't give it a chance at us. If the Lord had wanted us to be covered, we'd have come into the world with a shell like a turtle. Now, this rig ain't ideal because we've got to make some concessions to folks' narrowness and prejudice, but it's a long way ahead of ordinary dress." "Joel Dale!" The grim resolution of Persis' voice warned the dreamer of the family that the limit of her forbearance had been reached. "I'm not going to stand up for clothes, though seeing that my living, and yours too, depends on 'em, it's not for me to run 'em down. But this I will say, as long as we live in a civilized land, we've got to act civilized. And as for having you show yourself on this lawn in a get-up that would set every dog in Clematis to barking, I won't. Go up-stairs and dress like somebody beside a Fiji islander, but first give your feet and legs a good rubbing. If you don't, the next thing you know, you'll be down with pneumonia." Perhaps Joel's tyrannical rule in the household for the last twenty years had been due in part to his knowing the time to yield, a knowledge that would have prolonged the sway of many a despot. He went up-stairs in a rebellious mood which found expression in invectives against womankind, its blindness, its wilfulness, its weak subservience to usage. But when he appeared at the breakfast table, the conventional shirt and trousers testified to the extent of Persis' authority.