im--people with a lot of left-over consciences.

The P. G. S. of M. wanted to know what I meant by that.

I said I thought there were thousands of people--one sees them
everywhere in Massachusetts--fairly intelligent people, people who are
capable of changing their minds about things, but who can't change their
consciences. Their consciences seem to keep hanging on to them, in the
same set way--somehow--with or without their minds. "Some people's
consciences don't seem to notice much, so far as I can see, whether they
have minds connected with them or not." "Don't you know what it is," I
appealed to the P. G. S. of M., "to get everything all fixed up with
your mind and your reason and your soul; that certain things that look
wrong are all right,--the very things of all others that you ought to do
and keep on doing,--and then have your conscience keep right on the same
as it always did--tatting them up against you?"

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not spending very much time
thinking about his conscience.

I said I didn't believe in it, but I thought that if a man had one, it
was apt to trouble him a little off and on--especially if the one he had
was one of these left-over ones. "If you had one of these consciences--I
mean the kind of conscience that pretends to belong to you, and acts as
if it belonged to some one else," I said "one of these dead-frog-leg,
reflex-action consciences, working and twitching away on you day and
night, the way I have, you'd _have_ to think about it sometimes. You'd
get so ashamed of it. You'd feel trifled with so. You'd----"

The P. G. S. of M. said something about not being very much
surprised--over my case. He said that people who changed their minds as
often as I did couldn't reasonably expect consciences spry enough.

His general theory seemed to be that I had a conscience once and wore it
out.

"It's getting to be so with everybody nowadays," he said. "Nobody is
settled. Everything is blown about. We do not respect tradition either
in ourselves or in the life about us. No one listens to the Voice of
Experience."

"There she blows!" I said. I knew it was coming sooner or later. I added
that one of the great inconveniences of life, it seemed to me, was the
Intolerance of Experienced People.

II

On the Intolerance of Experienced People

It is generally assumed by persons who have taken the pains to put
themselves in this very disagreeable class, that people in gen