Doctor Colfax’s face became suffused. He bit his lip, then said, with quiet distinctness:
"If I had cut off a man’s leg with my own hands, and Mrs. Eddy, under my very eyes, caused a new leg to grow in the place of the old one, I would not believe in her or in anything she taught!"
Expressions of varying emotions swept over the faces of his listeners at this sincere statement of unbelief,--some were triumphant, some incredulous, some surprised, and one contemptuous.
"But, doctor, when you see Christian Science enrolling the names of the most brilliant minds; when you see the loveliest women forsaking a life of ease and pleasure and becoming practitioners,--Christian Science doctors just as selfless and single-minded as you--"
"If you are referring to that depraved woman who claims to have cured you, Miss Lee, that morphine fiend, that drunkard, that reformed character, I beg that you will not name her as a physician in any sense of the word. The medical profession is too noble to be degraded in such a manner!"
"Oh, doctor," cried Carolina, reproachfully, "if you could only hear the beautiful way in which she speaks of you!"
"Oh, doctor, aren’t you a little severe?" asked Mrs. Winchester.
Noel St. Quentin smothered an amused laugh.
"Pooh!" cried Kate. "Why pay any attention to him? He’s o-only a man, and men are always wrong! H-he’s talking through his h-hat, that’s w-what he’s doing. He’s jealous."
She was sitting near St. Quentin, and, turning to him under cover of the conversation, she murmured:
"What are you laughing at behind your hand?"
"I was simply remarking a phenomenon that I have often remarked before, and that is, that Christian Science seems to possess a peculiar power--"
"Oh, oh! are you going over to the enemy?" asked Kate.
"You didn’t let me finish. I was going to say that it possesses a peculiar power of making well-bred people forget what is due a civilized community. I have never, I think, heard so much rudeness, such rank inelegance, such brutal prejudice expressed on any subject which polite society discusses. It takes Christian Science every time to make people absolutely insulting to their best friends."
"Funny, isn’t it? I don’t mind it so much since Carolina got into it; she is so honest and so brave about answering it, b-but I used to hate it so it c-cankered the roof of my mouth j-just to speak the name of it."