"Perhaps all this is a part of our discipline. They are wiser than we. I accept even this disgrace as a good in disguise. Perhaps it was all intended to bring you to me."
The youth sank back again baffled by this all-inclosing acceptance. "What do you intend to do to-day?" he asked, as she rose and walked over to the little walnut table.
"Yes; and I wish you would sit with me for a few moments and see if we cannot secure direction for the day."
He was beginning to be curious--and his desire to dig deeper into his mother's brain overcame part of his repugnance.
"All right," he boyishly answered, but his heart contracted with sudden fear of finding her false. "Let's see what they're up to."
"Take a seat opposite me," she said, and there was something commanding in her voice.
Drawing a chair up to the old brown table--which he remembered as one of the pieces of furniture in his earliest childhood home--he took a seat.
"Why do you keep this rickety old thing?" he asked, shaking it viciously.
"It was your grandfather's reading-table, and he likes me to keep it. Besides, it is highly magnetized and very sensitive."
"Oh rats!" he irreverently burst forth. "You can't magnetize a piece of wood. Wood is a non-conductor. You can't subvert a physical law just by saying so."
"I don't mean it in that crude sense," she replied, quite mistress of herself. She had taken up and was holding between her hands a small hinged slate.
"To vitalize the surface. I am able to give it vitality by my touch." She laid the slate upon the table and placed her spread hand upon it. "Put your hand upon mine, Victor."
He did as she bade him, rebelling at the childish folly of it all. "What do you expect to do?" he asked.
Almost immediately the slate seemed seized by a powerful hand. It began to slide back and forth across the table violently, twisting and clattering. The youth put forth his own great strength and stopped it, but a crunching sound announced that the slate was broken.
His mother said, sharply, "You mustn't do that, Victor." She took up the slate and showed one corner crushed and crumbled. "You can't hold it--you mustn't try--it angers them."
He marveled at the strength which had resisted him, but argued that his mother from long practice had become very muscular. Hysterical people often displayed astounding power.