ons were but a clumsy representation of _real_
things behind the curtain--things he was for ever trying to get at, and
that sometimes he actually did get at.

He had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland
of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of
thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the
forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed and he could see
the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. Moreover, the fact
that he was a clerk in a fire insurance office, and did his work with
strict attention, never allowed him to forget for one moment that, just
beyond the dingy brick walls where the hundred men scribbled with
pointed pens beneath the electric lamps, there existed this glorious
region where the important part of himself dwelt and moved and had its
being. For in this region he pictured himself playing the part of a
spectator to his ordinary workaday life, watching, like a king, the
stream of events, but untouched in his own soul by the dirt, the noise,
and the vulgar commotion of the outer world.

And this was no poetic dream merely. Jones was not playing prettily with
idealism to amuse himself. It was a living, working belief. So convinced
was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception
practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great
building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to
see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away,
while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the
great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound--the spiritual
idea--which it represented in stone.

For something in this way it was that his mind worked.

Yet, to all appearances, and in the satisfaction of all business claims,
Jones was normal and unenterprising. He felt nothing but contempt for
the wave of modern psychism. He hardly knew the meaning of such words as
"clairvoyance" and "clairaudience." He had never felt the least desire
to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of
astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the
Psychical Research Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his "aura"
was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in
with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak
minds of mystical tendencies and unleashed imaginations.