We used to go down to family meals when there were no visitors; and there we made a curious quartette: Jimmy (as he wished me to call him) glum and silent; I with the tail of my eye always twisted round to him; Lady Saltire with her condescending eyelids and her blue veins; and the good-natured peer, fussy and genial, but always rather subdued in the presence of his wife. She looked as if a glass of good wine would do her good, and he as if he would be the better for abstinence; and so, in accordance with the usual lopsidedness of life, he drank freely, and she took nothing but lime-juice and water. You cannot imagine a more ignorant, intolerant, narrow-minded woman than she. If she had only been content to be silent and hidden that small brain of hers, it would not have mattered; but there was no end to her bitter and exasperating clacking. What was she after all but a thin pipe for conveying disease from one generation to another? She was bounded by insanity upon the north and upon the south. I resolutely set myself to avoid all argument with her; but she knew, with her woman’s instinct, that we were as far apart as the poles, and took a pleasure in waving the red flag before me. One day she was waxing eloquent as to the crime of a minister of an Episcopal church performing any service in a Presbyterian chapel. Some neighbouring minister had done it, it seems; and if he had been marked down in a pot house she could not have spoken with greater loathing. I suppose that my eyes were less under control than my tongue, for she suddenly turned upon me with: “I see that you don’t agree with me, Dr. Munro.” I replied quietly that I did not, and tried to change the conversation; but she was not to be shaken off. “Why not, may I ask?” I explained that in my opinion the tendency of the age was to break down those ridiculous doctrinal points which are so useless, and which have for so long set people by the ears. I added that I hoped the time was soon coming when good men of all creeds would throw this lumber overboard and join hands together. She half rose, almost speechless with indignation. “I presume,” said she, “that you are one of those people who would separate the Church from the State?” “Most certainly,” I answered. She stood erect in a kind of cold fury, and swept out of the room. Jimmy began to chuckle, and his father looked perplexed. “I am sorry that my opinions are offensive to Lady Saltire,” I remarked. “Yes, yes; it’s a pity; a pity,” said he “well, well, we must say what we think; but it’s a pity you think it--a very great pity.”