things a little more
rationally? It is for your own sake I am speaking. Why should you make
yourself old by dressing as if you were eighty simply because your
grandmother did so?"

She was right, of course, for the trouble with Science is not its
blindness, but its serene infallibility. As useless to reject her
conclusions as to deny the laws and the principles of mathematics! After
all manner of denials, the laws and the principles would still remain.
Virginia, who had never argued in her life, did not attempt to do so
with her own daughter. She merely accepted the truth of Jenny's
inflexible logic; and with that obstinate softness which is an
inalienable quality of tradition, went on believing precisely what she
had believed before. To have made them think alike, it would have been
necessary to melt up the two generations and pour them into one--a task
as hopeless as an endeavour to blend the Dinwiddie Young Ladies' Academy
with a modern college. Jenny's clearly formulated and rather loud
morality was unintelligible to her mother, whose conception of duty was
that she should efface herself and make things comfortable for those
around her. The obligation to think independently was as
incomprehensible to Virginia as was that wider altruism which had swept
Jenny's sympathies beyond the home into the factory and beyond the
factory into the world where there were "evils." Her own instinct had
always been the true instinct of the lady to avoid "evil," not to seek
it, to avoid it, honestly if possible, and, if not honestly--well, to
avoid it at any cost. The love of truth for truth's sake was one of the
last of the virtues to descend from philosophy into a working theory of
life, and it had been practically unknown to Virginia until Jenny had
returned, at the end of her first year, from college. To be sure, Oliver
used to talk like that long ago, but it was so long ago that she had
almost forgotten it.

"You are very clever, dear--much too clever for me," she said, rising
from her knees. "I wonder if Lucy has anything else she wants to go into
this trunk? It might be packed a little tighter."

In response to her call, the door opened and Lucy entered breathlessly,
with her hair, which she had washed and not entirely dried, hanging over
her shoulders.

"What is it, mother? Oh, Jenny, you have come! I'm so glad!"

The sisters kissed delightedly. In spite of their lack of sympathy, they
were very fond of each other.

"D