ttention, excited her
intelligence to curiosity, and focussed her interest to a mental
concentration.

Out of which emerged deductions--curious fruits of logic, experience,
instinct, intuitiveness, and of some extraneous perception, outside of
and independent of her own conscious and objective personality.

But in one radical particular Athalie differed from any individual of
either sex ever recorded in the history of hypnotic therapeutics or of
psychic phenomena.

For those two worlds in which we all dwell, the supraliminal or waking
world, the transliminal, or sleeping world, were merged in this young
girl.

The psychological fact that natural or induced sleep is necessary for
extraneous or for auto-suggestion, did not exist for her. Her psychic
qualities were natural and beautiful, as much a part of her objective
as of her subjective life. Neither the trance induced by mesmerism or
hypnotism, nor the less harmful slumber by induction, nor the sleep of
nature itself was necessary for the girl to find herself in rapport
with others or with her own higher personality--her superior spiritual
self. Nor did her clairvoyance require trances; nor was sleep in
others necessary before she ventured suggestion.

A celebrated physician who had been eager to meet her found her
extremely interesting but rather beyond his ability to classify.

How much of her he believed to be fraud might be suspected by what he
said to her that evening in a corner of a very grand house on Fifth
Avenue:

"There is no such thing as a 'control'; there is no such thing as a
'medium.' No so-called medium has ever revealed anything that did not
exist either in her own consciousness or in the consciousness of some
other living human being.

"Self-delusion induced by auto-suggestion accounts for the more
respectable victims of Spiritism. For Spiritism is a doctrine accepted
by many people of education, intelligence, refinement, and of
generally excellent judgment.

"And it is a pity, because Spiritism is a bar to all real
intellectual, material, moral, and spiritual progress. It thrives only
because it pretends to satisfy an intense human craving--the desire
to re-establish personal relations with the dead. It never has done
this; it never will, Miss Greensleeve. And if you really believe it
has done this you are sadly and hopelessly mistaken."

"But," said Athalie, looking at him out of blue eyes the chiefest
beauty of which was their fearle