kness of his hair, and his long thin
hands. At another her fancy liked to evoke his superstitions. For him
the past, present and future were not twain, but one thing. And every
time she saw him, she was more and more interested. Every time she
discovered something new in him--he did not exist on the surface of
things, but deep in himself; and she wondered if she would ever know
him.

Her thoughts paused a moment, and then she remembered something he had
said. It had struck her at the time, but now it appeared to her more
than ever interesting. Catholicism, he had said, had not fallen from
him--he had merely learnt that it was only part of the truth; he had
gone further, he had raised himself to a higher spirituality. It was not
that he wanted less, but more than Catholicism could give him. In
religion, as in art, there were higher and lower states. We began by
admiring "Faust," and went on to Wagner, hence to Beethoven and
Palestrina. Catholicism was the spiritual fare of the multitude; there
was a closer communion with the divine essence. She had forgotten what
came next.... He held that we are always warned of our destiny and it
had been proved that in the hypnotic sleep, when the pulse of life was
weakest, almost at pause, there was a heightening of the powers of
vision and hearing. A patient whose eyes had been covered with layers of
cotton wool had been able to read the newspaper. Another patient had
been able to tell what was passing in another mind, and at a distance of
a mile. The only explanation that Charcot could give of this second
experiment was that the knowledge had been conveyed through the rustling
of the blood in the veins, which the hypnotic sleep had enabled the
patient to hear. And Ulick submitted that this scientific explanation
was more incredible than any spiritual one. There was much else. There
was all Ulick's wonderful talk about the creation of things by thought,
and his references to the mysterious Kabbala had strangely interested
her. But suddenly she remembered that perchance his spiritualism was
allied to the black art of the necromancers; and her Catholic conscience
was mysteriously affrighted, and she experienced the attraction of
terror. Was it possible that he believed that all the accidents, or what
we suppose are accidents, have been earned in a preceding life? Did he
really believe that lovers may tempt each other life after life, that a
group of people may come together again?