It was perhaps because he knew the whole of my story and had even lived through a chapter of it himself that he took an interest in me which was disproportionate to any offering I was capable of making him. Or it might have been, instead, that the Sunday drives were a prolonged but unconscious apology for his unjustified rebuke on the occasion of my first visit to his office when he thought I was seeking an abortionist. No mention was made of his mistake again, not, I am sure, because a review of the incident would have caused him any embarrassment, but because he had forgotten it when I ceased in his mind to be the kind of young woman liable to the charge. He thought that the principle of my being was a fanatical filial piety, carried to a degree that necessarily excluded the sort of selfish attachment which could terminate in so sordid a dilemma as an illegitimate pregnancy. His misconstruction, his over-simplification of my relationship with Mamma made me suspect, sometimes, that he had not the insight into people which is, we are told, the prerequisite of the successful physician. Now neither had Dr. Galbraith understood our household but for a different reason. He had been a blind man leading the blind. But Philip McAllister, through an intellectual, an almost literary faith in the perfectability of human nature, believed that had I not been completely devoted to my mother, I should long ago have run away from home. Thus, assigning to me the sanguine humor in distinction to the bilious or the choleric, he neglected to take into account the fourth, that is, the phlegmatic, which made up at least half of my composition. But whatever his motive was, he succeeded in my gradual reformation. By respecting my loyalty to my mother, he unwittingly shamed me into a real loyalty whose articulation was my faithful weekly visit to the asylum which came, in time, to be essential to my life. Although nothing was accomplished and frequently I was not allowed to see her (For she had seasons of bitter hatred for me as the cruellest of all her persecutors. These came when something sharpened her senses and she realized where she was.), I was determined to regain her love just as the sometimes uncertain communicant is determined to learn faith through his reception of the holy wafer and his prayers.