f 'parthenogenesis' which proved so
conclusively the truth of her own firm conviction, that the faults she
deplored in her son's children were all inherited directly from her
daughter-in-law, whom she detested; ignorant of the fact that the sun
which she regarded as a dazzling yellow fire was by bolometric measures
shown to be in reality of a restful, and refreshing blue color. By the
time I was fully convinced that teleology was as dead as the Ptolemaic
theory, and that 'wings were not planned for flight, but that flight
has produced wings', hence that Haeckel's gospel of 'Dysteleology' or
purposelessness in Nature satisfactorily explained creation--a great
wave of oriental theosophy overflowed us; and a revival of Buddhism
invited me to seek Nirvana as the final beatitude, where--

"'We shall be
Part of the mighty universal whole,
And through all icons mix and mingle with the
Kosmic Soul!'"

Or to make matters clearer still:

"'Om, mani Padma, Om! the dewdrop slips
Into the shining sea!'"

Even a sponge can hold only so much, and I fell back--or shall I say
forward--in the path of progress to rest in the dimness of agnosticism.
Is it strange, Leo, that I am desperately tired; and willing to plant
my feet on the rock of matrimony, which will neither dissolve nor slip
away, and to which my vows will moor me firmly?"

"If you had clung to your Bible, and prayed more, you would not have
wasted so signally the years that might have brought you enduring
happiness. Forgive me, Alma, but you have lived solely for self."

"Yet now, when I propose to live solely for somebody else, you shake me
off, and repudiate me? Selfish you think? I dare say I am, but religion
now-a-day winks at that, nay fosters it. Each church is an octopus, and
the members are laboriously striving to disprove the Saviour's
admonition: 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.' I am no worse than my
ritualistic sisters whom I meet and gossip with, under cover of the
organ muttering, and sometimes I wonder if after all we are any nearer
the kingdom of heaven that Christ preached, than the pagans whose
customs we retain under evangelical names. 'They sacrificed a white kid
to the propitious divinities, and a black kid to the unpropiticus.' Do
not we likewise? The church or one of its pensioners needs money; so
instead of denying ourselves some secular amusement, cutting short our
chablis, terrapin, pate