n growth of exotic and unnatural spiritualism on to her
primitive nature. The nature remained the same, but the graft or
grafts bore strange flowers and fruit, unholy flowers and
poisonous fruit. Therefore she was not to blame--sometimes I
wonder whether in this curious world, could one see their past
and their future, anybody is to blame for anything--but this did
not make her the less dangerous.

Some talks I had with her only increased my apprehensions, for I
found that in a way she had no conscience. Life, she told me,
was but a dream, and all its laws as evolved by man were but
illusions. The real life was elsewhere. There was the distant
lake on which the flower of our true existence floated. Without
this unseen lake of supernatural water the flower could not
float; indeed there would be no flower. Moreover, the flower did
not matter; sometimes it would have this shape and colour,
sometimes that. It was but a thing destined to grow and bloom
and rot, and during its day to be ugly or to be beautiful, to
smell sweet or ill, as it might chance, and ultimately to be
absorbed back into the general water of Life.

I pointed out to her that all flowers had roots which grew in
soil. Looking at an orchid-like plant that crept along the bough
of a tree, she answered that this was not true as some grew upon
air. But however this might be, the soil, or the moisture in the
air, was distilled from thousands of other flower lives that had
flourished in their day and been forgotten. It did not matter
when they died or how many other flowers they choked that they
might live. Yet each flower had its own spirit which always had
been and always would be.

I asked her of the end and the object of that spirit. She
answered darkly that she did not know and if she did, would not
say, but that these were very dreadful.

Such were some of her vague and figurative assertions which I
only record to indicate their uncomfortable and indeed but half
human nature. I forgot to add that she declared that every
flower or life had a twin flower or life, which in each
successive growth it was bound to find and bloom beside, or
wither to the root and spring again and that ultimately these two
would become one, and as one flourish eternally. Of all of which
I understood and understand little, except that she had grasped
the elements of some truth which she could not express in clear
and definite language.

One day I was seated