Mrs. Lora Delane Porter dismissed the hireling who had brought herautomobile around from the garage and seated herself at the wheel. Itwas her habit to refresh her mind and improve her health by a dailydrive between the hours of two and four in the afternoon.

　　The world knows little of its greatest women, and it is possible thatMrs. Porter's name is not familiar to you. If this is the case, I ampained, but not surprised. It happens only too often that the uplifterof the public mind is baulked by a disinclination on the part of thepublic mind to meet him or her half-way. The uplifter does his share.

　　He produces the uplifting book. But the public, instead of standingstill to be uplifted, wanders off to browse on coloured supplements andmagazine stories.

　　If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair.

　　Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gaveyou the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have putit down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She putmost things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of themodern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, onlong-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imaginedthat they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathersand even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reasonTwentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters inArizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyondrecall.

　　Mrs. Porter's mind worked backward and forward. She had one eye on thepast, the other on the future. If she was strong on heredity, she wasstronger on the future of the race. Most of her published works dealtwith this subject. A careful perusal of them would have enabled therising generation to select its ideal wife or husband with perfectease, and, in the event of Heaven blessing the union, her littlevolume, entitled "The Hygienic Care of the Baby," which was all aboutgerms and how to avoid them, would have insured the continuance of thedirect succession.

　　Unfortunately, the rising generation did not seem disposed to a carefulperusal of anything except the baseball scores and the beauty hints inthe Sunday papers, and Mrs. Porter's public was small. In fact, heronly real disciple, as she sometimes told herself in her rare moods ofdiscouragement, was her niece, Ruth Bannister, daughter of JohnBannister, the millionaire. It was not so long ago, she reflected withpride, that she had induced Ruth to refuse to marry Basil Milbank--aconsiderable feat, he being a young man of remarkable personalattractions and a great match in every way. Mrs. Porter's objection tohim was that his father had died believing to the last that he was ateapot.

　　There is nothing evil or degrading in believing oneself a teapot, butit argues a certain inaccuracy of the thought processes; and Mrs.