After that they kept still; but the good doctor had effectually sealed one heart to whatever that was tender and earnest he might have to say.  She sat erect, with scornful eyes and glowing cheeks, and when the first flush of excitement passed off was simply harder and gayer than before.  Who imagined such a result as that?  Nobody, of course.  But how perfectly foolish and illogical!  Couldn’t she see that Dr. Eggleston only meant to refer to the fact that literature, both of prose and poetry, had been improved by being brought to the level of childish minds, and to reprove that way of teaching religious truth, that leaves a somber, dismal impression on youthful hearts?  Apparently she could not, since she did not.  As for being absurd and illogical, I did not say that she wasn’t.  I am simply giving you facts as they occurred.  I think myself that she was dishonoring the memory of her father ten thousand times more than any chance and unmeant word of the speakers could possibly have done.  The only trouble was, that she was such an idiot she did not see it; and she prided herself on her powers of reasoning, too!  But the world is full of idiots.  She sat like a stone during the rest of the brilliant lecture.  Many things she heard because she could not help hearing; many she admired, because it was in her to admire a brilliant and charming thing, and she could not help that, either; but she could shut her heart to all tenderness of feeling and all softening influences, and that she did with much satisfaction, deliberately steeling herself against the words of a man because he had quoted a chance line that her father used to sing, while she lived every day of her life in defiance of the principles by which her father shaped his life and his death!  Verily, the ways of girls are beyond understanding.

Eurie enjoyed it all.  When Dr. Eggleston told of the men that, as soon as their children grew a little too restless, had business down town, she clapped her hands softly and whispered: 

“That is for all the world like father.  Neddie and Puss were never in a whining fit in their lives that father didn’t at once think of a patient he had neglected to visit that day, and rush off.”

She laughed over the thought that women were shut in with little steam engines, and said: 

“That’s a capital name for them; we have three at home that are always just at the very point of explosion.  I mean to write to mother and tell her I have found a new name for them.”

When he suggested the blunt-end scissors, and the colored crayons with which they could make wonderful yellow dogs, with green tails and blue eyes, her delight became so great that she looked around to Ruth to help her enjoy it, and said: 

“You see if I don’t invest in a ton of colored crayons the very first thing I do when I get home; it is just capital!  So strange I never thought of it before.”

“You did not think of it now,” Ruth said, in her quiet cooling way.  “Give the speaker credit for his own ideas, please.  Half the world have to do the thinking for the other half always.”