“My dear, I would have you choose your adjectives more carefully. Pernicious is an offensive word to use in connection with a subject of which you know so little. Oblige me by deferring your judgment until you are better acquainted with the subject. Your blind prejudice is making you censorious.” Mr. Wylie employed his most lofty tone and manner. “I never want to know more of the subject, and I shall always regret that I ever went or took Mrs. Lucien to hear that man!” Mrs. Wylie’s blue eyes filled with tears. “Why, see here, Puss, you seem more out of humor than usual. What has happened to Mrs. Lucien?” “Matter enough! She is entirely carried away with that—that Dr. Lyman’s creed,” she stammered. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling me where she has gone,” he suggested with serio-comic gravity. Mrs. Wylie smiled through her tears. “O, she is here yet, at least in body, but her mind is up in the clouds roving around after familiar spirits. She was in some kind of a trance when I went there to-day, and wrote me a letter purporting to come from some mystical source.” “Ah?” Mr. Wylie became interested. “It didn’t amount to anything. The whole thing was dreadful.” “Why dreadful? Did you keep the letter?” “Yes, here it is upon my shopping-tablet.” She detached the ivory ornament and handed it to him. He studied it carefully, then said: “And she was unconscious when she wrote this, you say?” “Yes, apparently.” “Strange, strange. It is as I thought. Mrs. Lucien will develop into a writing medium. It is such ethereal natures as hers that are chosen.” “But, Horace, I cannot endure the thought of such a thing.” “And why not, pray?” Again his eyebrows were exasperatingly elevated. “Because there is no good in it. Because it will ruin her, body and soul. Whoever goes into that belief does so at his peril. He either becomes insane or helplessly demoralized before many months or years.” “Where have you learned so much, Mrs. Wylie? It appears to me I have never seen you so much excited over anything before. Who has been talking to you?” “I heard Mr. Smalley’s address at church last Sunday evening, which you would not go to hear. He said it was a most pernicious and dangerous theory to follow. That it led to—” “O, I know. It is the wholesale condemnation of heterodoxy by orthodoxy. It is believe what I believe or be damned. All else is of the Devil. It has been the habit of most people since the world began to denounce as heresy, or ridicule as madness, things too high for their sight or too deep for their comprehension. But the day has gone by for this sort of thing. It is merely a confession of ignorance, now-a-days, to assert a total disbelief in psychic and supernatural phenomena.” “But, Horace, there is much fraud and trickery connected with it. Think of that exposé last winter of that Mrs. Brunner.” “O, that is liable to happen in any creed or theology. There are always some who make pretensions from merely selfish motives.”