you have no need to walk, to grasp, nor yet to sit?  Of what use organs of sense when you have no brain to which they lead?—­when you are substantially all brain and the result independent of the method?  Hence he abolished by logical and anatomical necessity, as well as the human form, the human face with eyes, ears, nose and mouth, and by the inexorable necessities of the case came down to a transparent bag, pear-shaped, for the better passage of his angels through the air.

“A fulfillment of the old proverb that extremes meet,” he said by way of conclusion.  “The beginning of man an ascidian—­his ultimate development as an angel, a pear-shaped, transparent bag.”

Mrs. Corfield never forgave her old friend, and even now if any one began a conversation on the theory of development and evolution she invariably lost her temper and permitted herself to say rude things.  Her idea of angels and souls in bliss was the good orthodox notion of men and women with exactly the same features and identity as they had when in the flesh, but infinitely more beautiful; retaining the Ego, but the Ego refined and purified out of all trace of human weakness, all characteristic passions, tempers and proclivities; and the pear-shaped bag was as far removed from the truth, as she held it, on the one side as Leam’s materialistic conception was on the other.  The character and condition of departed souls was one of the subjects on which she was very positive and very aggressive, and Leam had a hard fight of it when her hostess came to discuss her mother’s present personality and whereabouts, and wanted to convince her of her transformation.

All the same, the little woman was kind-hearted and conscientious, but she was not always pleasant.  She wanted the grace and sweetness known genetically as womanliness, as do most women who hold the doctrine of feminine moral supremacy, with base man, tyrant, enemy and inferior, holding down the superior being by force of brute strength and responsible for all her faults.  And she wanted the smoothness of manner known as good breeding.  Though a gentlewoman by birth, she gave one the impression of a pert chambermaid matured into a tyrannical landlady.

But she meant kindly by Leam when she took her from the loneliness of her father’s house, and her very sharpness and prickly spiritualism were for the child’s enduring good.  Her attempts, however, to make Leam regard mamma in heaven as in any wise different from mamma on earth were utterly abortive.  Leam’s imagination could not compass the thaumaturgy tried to be inculcated.  Mamma, if mamma at all, was mamma as she had known her; and if as she had known her, then she was unhappy and desolate, seeing what a wicked thing this was that papa had done.  She clung to this point as tenaciously as she clung to her love; and nothing that Mrs. Corfield, or even Alick, could say weakened by one line her belief in mamma’s angry sorrow and the saints’ potent and sometimes peccant humanity.