n
mad moments in my life when I have felt all-powerful, as if I had got hold
of the ribbon ends of an incantation! This is another one of my
limitations at which you must not laugh. For a juggler must be taken
seriously, or he juggles in vain; he must have an opportunity to create
the necessary illusion in you to insure the success of his performance.
Meanwhile, I go to make the circle of my dance smaller; who knows but
to-morrow I may be a snow-bunting on your tall cliffs, or a little
homeless wren seeking shelter in your valley.

XI

PHILIP TO JESSICA

MY DEAR MISS DOANE:

So I am a disembodied ghost in your estimation, and you, "happy dancer,"
are whirling around the rim of my shadow-land with some sweet incantation
learned in your Georgia woods to conjure me out into the visible world.
Really I would call that a delicious bit of impertinence were I not afraid
the word might be taken in the wrong sense.

And yet, I must confess it, there is too much truth in what you say. Some
day, when I am bolder, I may unfold to you the whole story of my ruin--for
it is a ruin to be disembodied, is it not? I may even indicate the single
phrase, the mysterious word of all mysteries, that might evoke the spirit
from the past and incarnate him in the living present. Do not try to guess
the phrase, I beseech you, for it would frighten you now and so I should
lose my one chance of reincarnation. When I visit you in the South, some
day soon, I will tell you the magic word I have learned.

What hocus-pocus I must seem to be talking, as if there were some cheap
tragedy in my life. Indeed there is nothing of the sort. I have lived as
tamely as a house-cat, my only escapade having been an innocent attempt at
playing Timon for a couple of years. The drama of my life has been a mere
battling with shadows. Your relation of the effect produced in your home
by Dr. Minot's heresies carries me back to the first act in that shadow
fight, for I too was brought up by the strictest of parents, and, indeed,
was myself, as a boy, a veritable prodigy of piety. What would you think
of me as a preacher expounding the gospel over a piano-stool for pulpit to
a rapt congregation of three? I could show you a sermon of that precocious
Mr. Pound-text printed in the New York _Observer_ when he was as much as
nine years old--and the sermon might be worse.

I can recall these facts readily enough; but the battle of doubt and faith
that I passed thro