"You can't tell what a start it gave me, Ruth," she said. "I heard her, and I thought of wild beasts and wild Indians, and all sorts of horrors. Then when I saw her, I didn't know her at first. Her hair was all tousled up, and she wrung her hands in the craziest way."
"I couldn't. She ran away as soon as I called to her. She'll end in a lunatic asylum if you don't get hold of her."
"What can I do, Miss Charlotte?" I asked her. "The trouble is she is half crazy about sin and judgment, and things of that sort that I don't even believe in at all. What can I say? You don't want me to tell her her father's religion is a mistake, I suppose."
Miss Charlotte smiled serenely, and regarded me with a look of much sweet kindliness.
"You're a fearful heathen, Ruth," was her response, "but you have a fine wheedling way with you. Couldn't you persuade her she's too young to think about such things?"
"I've tried something of the kind, but she says she is not too young to die. She is like a child out of an old memoir. She isn't of our time at all. We read of that sort of a girl, but I supposed they all died a hundred years ago."
"I doubt if there ever were such girls," Miss Charlotte returned with candor; "except once in a very great while. I think the girls of the memoirs were very much like the rest of us most of the time. They probably had spells of being like Kathie. The difference is that she is at boiling point all the time."
"Of course it's her father," I said thoughtfully.
"Yes," she assented. "He's such a rampant Methodist."
I could not help the shadow of a smile, and when she saw it Miss Charlotte could no more help smiling in her turn.
"Of course you think it's a case of the pot's calling the kettle black," she said, "but the Methodists do make such a business of frightening folks out of their wits. We don't do that."
I let this pass, and asked if she couldn't make some practical suggestion for the treatment of Kathie.
"I can't tell you how to dilute her Methodism," she returned with a shrewd twinkle in her eye. "You must know the way better than I do."
I am troubled and perplexed. I have so many times wondered what I ought to do about talking to Kathie. I have always felt that the fact her father trusted her with me put me on my honor not to say things to her of which he would not approve. It seemed unwise, too, for the child to have any more turmoil in her brain than is there already; and I know that to make her doubt would be to drive her half distracted. The question is whether she has not really begun to doubt already, and needs to be helped to think fearlessly. She is a strange survival from another century. Our grandmothers used to agonize over sin, it is claimed, although I think Miss Charlotte is probably right when she says they were after all a good deal like us. At any rate they were brought up to dread eternal punishment, but it is astonishing to find anybody now who receives this as anything but a theory. Belief in the old creeds would seem impossible in these days except in a conventional and remote fashion; and yet Kathie takes it all with the desperation of two hundred years ago. If she were to listen to a suggestion of using her creed less like a hair-shirt, she would feel she had committed an appalling transgression. She is only a baby after all, and heaven knows what business she has with creeds anyway. I would as soon think of giving Tomine dynamite bombs to play with.