Husband and wife -- Fiction; Mothers and sons -- Fiction
Even Katharine felt the change instinctively, although, nowadays, she
was too absorbed in realizing her identity with the All-Mind, with
proving that suffering was nothing in the world but absent-minded sin,
to pay any great attention to so concrete a matter as her husband's
improved appetite and better sleep. Katharine, by now, had come to the
point where she was beginning to dispense with the services of Doctor
Keltridge in any minor crisis; and, instead, to sit and meditate upon
the crisis, with a black-bound, fine-print, much-begilded volume open
on her knee. As always, Katharine reckoned shrewdly. If an ordinary
five-dollar copy of her new spiritual check-book upon the bank of
health were potent to subdue any sort of pains from indigestion to a
raging tooth, then a ten-dollar binding super-added ought, of a surety,
to be able to cope with tuberculosis or the hookworm. Therefore she had
chosen to fortify herself once and for all.
Meanwhile, the little table beside her bed-head was fast heaping itself
with small books of devotion, books from which the old-time cross was
conspicuously absent. At present, it was taxing all her ingenuity, all
the fervour of her new belief, to make its tenets tally with her young
son's attitude concerning colic, doubtless because, at some point or
other, he had escaped from perfect contact with the All-Mind, the
Healer. Some noxious claim or other still held good over him, despite
her efforts to eradicate its malignant influence. It was disappointing.
Still, as yet she was merely a novice in the great order of the new
religion; and she only wondered at the swift hold her untrained mind
had gained upon the pliant body of her husband.
Katharine smiled contentedly above her open book. Strange that she ever
could have cherished the false notion that she and Scott were alien in
their natures! Rather not! They both were ultra-scientific,
fundamentally alike. As yet, of course, Scott did not spell his science
with an X; but that was bound to come. How could it be otherwise,
indeed, when his mere carnal appetite for bacon and dry toast had
multiplied itself by ten, as result of her devotion to the book now
lying open on her knee? It would be so very good, when she had brought
her own husband to her way of thinking. For Scott was still her
husband, still in a sense her property; therefore he still was dear to
her, after her selfish fashion. His acceptance of her standards would
be infinitely good; infinitely better would be the knowledge that she
herself had converted him to their acceptation. And after Scott?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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