“Really, Bishop!  I thought you had passed the sophomoric stage, and it is a shameful waste of dialectic ammunition to throw your antithesis at me.  According to your doctrine, America ought to buy up and import all the deformed unfortunates who are annually exposed in China, in order that our people should properly appreciate the superiority of sound limbs, and the value of the five senses; and healthy young people should throng the lazarettos and alms-houses to learn the nature of their own disadvantages.  It is equally desirable that wise men like you and Peyton should accustom yourselves to the society of—­well—­I use polite diction, of imbeciles, of ‘innocents,’ in order to set a true value on learning and your own astute logic?”

“My dear little mother, you chop your logic so furiously with a broad axe, that you darken the air with a hurricane of chips and splinters.  Like all ladies who attempt to argue, you rush into the reductio ad absurdum, and find it impossible to discriminate between——­”

“Wisdom and conceit?  Bless you, Bishop, observation has taught me all the shades and delicate gradations of that difference.  We women no more mistake the latter for the former, than the gods who declined to turn cannibal when they went to dine with Tantalus, and were offered a fricassee of Pelops.  Now I——­

“Ceres did eat of it!” exclaimed her son, adroitly avoiding a tweak of the ear, by throwing his head back, beyond the touch of her fingers.

“A wretched pagan fable, sir, with which orthodox bishops should hold no communion.  Tell me, you beardless Gamaliel, where you accumulated your knowledge relative to the education of girls?  Present us a chart of your experience.  You talk of hampering and cramping Regina’s faculties, as if I had put her brains in a pair of stays, and daily tightened the lacers.”

“I am inclined to think the usual forms of female education have precisely that effect.  The fact is, mother, it appears that women in this country are expected to come the reserve magazines of piety, of religious fervour, on the certainly powerful principle that ‘ignorance is the mother of devotion.’  True knowledge, which springs from fearless investigation, is a far nobler and more reliable conservator of pure vital Christianity.”

“Exempli gratia, Miss Martineau and Madame Dudevant, who are crowned heads among the cognoscenti? Or perhaps you would prefer a second ‘La Pelouse,’ governed by Miss Weber, who certainly agrees with you, ’that girls are trained too delicately to allow the mind to expand.’  Illuminated and expanded by ‘philosophy’ and ’social progress’ she and Madame Dudevant long ago literally abjured stays, and glory in the usurpation of vests, pantaloons, coats, and short hair.  Be pleased to fancy my Regina, my blue-eyed snowbird, shorn of that

‘Gloriole of ebon locks on calmed brows’!

I would rather see her in her coffin, shrouded in a ruffled pinafore.”