ther in the delights of photography or in the
horrors of war. Baumgartner seemed aware that he had been somewhat
confidential on both subjects, and that either his contempt of human life,
or his ambitions in the matter of psychic photography, would have been
better kept to himself; but, on the other hand, he "greatly doubted
whether they taught boys to put two and two together, at these so-called
public schools"; and, after all, it was not detection by the boy, but
through the boy, that he had to fear.

"The madness of keeping him prisoner, as he had been from the beginning,
in spite of all pretences and persuasions to the contrary, was another
thing to which Baumgartner had been thoroughly alive all along. He had
regarded it from the first as 'the certain beginning of the end'; from the
first, he had been prepared with specious explanations for any such
inquisitor as the one who had actually arrived no later than the Saturday
afternoon. He wrote without elation of his interview with Thrush, whose
name he knew; the doctor had not been deceived as to the transitory
character of his own deception. It was the same with the letter which he
had pretended to post, which could only have kept the boy quiet for a day
or two, if he had posted it, but which the boy himself had discovered
never to have been posted at all. There was a sufficiently cool
description of the desperate mood into which Baumgartner's intuition of
the boy's discovery had thrown him on the Sunday night."

"It was then," he wrote, "that I formed a project which I should have been
sorry indeed to carry out, though I should certainly have done so if he
had given me the chance I sought. It must be understood that my second
attempt to photograph the flight of the soul had proved as great a fiasco
as the first. Suddenly I hit upon a perfectly conceivable (even though it
seem a wilfully grotesque) explanation of my failure. What if the human
derelicts I had so far chosen for my experiments had no souls to
photograph? Sodden with drink, debauched, degraded, and spiritually
blurred or blunted to the last degree, these after all were the least
likely subjects to yield results to the spirit photographer. I should
have chosen saints instead of sinners such as these, entities in which the
soul was a major and not a minor factor. I thought of the saintliest men
I knew in London, of some Jesuit Fathers of my acquaintance, of a 'light'
specialist I know of who is