“You understand me well enough, only you like to make me blunder where you can talk,” said my wife, putting her hand in mine. “But I will try. Sometimes, after thinking about something for a long time, you come to a conclusion about it, and you think you have settled it plain and clear to yourself, for ever and a day. You hang it upon your wall, like a picture, and are satisfied for a fortnight. But some day, when you happen to cast a look at it, you find that instead of hanging flat on the wall, your picture has gone through it--opens out into some region you don’t know where--shows you far-receding distances of air and sea--in short, where you thought one question was settled for ever, a hundred are opened up for the present hour.” “Bravo, wife!” I cried in true delight. “I do indeed understand you now. You have said it better than I could ever have done. That’s the plague of you women! You have been taught for centuries and centuries that there is little or nothing to be expected of you, and so you won’t try. Therefore we men know no more than you do whether it is in you or not. And when you do try, instead of trying to think, you want to be in Parliament all at once.” “Do you apply that remark to me, sir?” demanded Ethelwyn. “You must submit to bear the sins of your kind upon occasion,” I answered. “I am content to do that, so long as yours will help mine,” she replied. “Then I may go on?” I said, with interrogation. “Till sunrise if you like. We were talking of the cubicalness--I believe you called it--of nature.” “And you capped it with the cubicalness of thought. And quite right too. There are people, as a dear friend of mine used to say, who are so accustomed to regard everything in the _flat_, as dogma cut and--not _always_ dried my moral olfactories aver--that if you prove to them the very thing they believe, but after another mode than that they have been accustomed to, they are offended, and count you a heretic. There is no help for it. Even St. Paul’s chief opposition came from the Judaizing Christians of his time, who did not believe that God _could_ love the Gentiles, and therefore regarded him as a teacher of falsehood. We must not be fierce with them. Who knows what wickedness of their ancestors goes to account for their stupidity? For that there are stupid people, and that they are, in very consequence of their stupidity, conceited, who can deny? The worst of it is, that no man who is conceited can be convinced of the fact.” “Don’t say that, Harry. That is to deny conversion.”