"Philip," she said to her son, who was sitting by the window reading a folio volume of Sir Thomas Browne, "I asked Phillida to come early this afternoon, and I can't imagine what keeps her." "Oh, some leper, or some one who has fallen among thieves. It's a dreadful thing to be a Christian. I have only known three or four, and Phillida is one of them." "You don't mean to say we are not all Christians?" demanded Philip's father, a taciturn man with a rather handsome face of the broad Dutch type. What history it carried was mainly one of good dinners and fine wines. The senior Gouverneur had been sitting looking into the fire for half an hour without saying a word. His son's way of treating the sacred white elephants of conventionality was the main grief of this dignified, well-bred, entirely commonplace man. "Yes, you're all--we're all, Christians in the sense that we're neither Jews, Mohammedans, nor Buddhists. But most of us don't belong to the same totem with Jesus." "What do you mean by the same totem with Jesus?" said the mother, who could not help shuddering a little at the temerity of her son's paradoxes, though fondly indulgent of his irreverent cleverness. "A totem among the Indians is the subdivision of a tribe. The Mohawks or Cayugas, for example, were subdivided into totems called the 'Wolf,' the 'Turtle,' the 'Bear.' Every man belonged to the totem of his mother and was akin to everybody in it. If a Mohawk of the Wolf totem stopped in the village of the Cayugas or the Senecas, he was entertained by some Seneca of the same totem who claimed him for a kinsman." "That's very curious," said his mother. "I don't see what it's got to do with your cousin Phillida or with religion," said Mr. Gouverneur, who as an elder in the Dutch Reformed Church, and as the descendant of a long line of men and women who had traveled in the same well-worn path since the good old days of the Synod of Dort, felt much annoyed at Philip's waywardness.