superficially atavistic. His practical brain refused
to speculate even upon the doctrine of metempsychosis. He was like his
mother in many ways. That unique and powerful personality had stamped
his brain cells when he was wholly hers. He recalled that his own soul
had echoed faintly with memories in his youth. What wonder that he had
given this inheritance to the most sensitively constituted of his
children, whose musical genius, the least sane of all gifts, put her in
touch with the greater mysteries of the Universe? That nebulous memories
moved like ghosts in her soul he did not doubt, nor that at such moments
she was tormented with vague maternal pangs. He conquered his first
impulse to confess himself to her; doubtless she needed more help than
he. She was staring at him in mingled terror and agony.

"Why do you suffer so when I suffer?" he asked gently; then bluntly, "do
you yearn over me as if I were your child, and in peril?"

"Yes," she answered, without betraying any surprise; "that is it. I have
a terrible feeling of responsibility and helplessness, of understanding
and knowing nothing. I feel sometimes as if I had done you a great
wrong, for which I suffer when you are in trouble, and I am no more use
to you than John or little Eliza. If you would tell me. If you would let
me share it with you. You remember I begged as a child. You have made
believe to tell me secrets many times, but you have told me nothing. My
imagination has nearly shattered me."

"Do you wish to know?" he asked. "Are you strong enough to see me as I
see myself to-night? I warn you it will be a glimpse into Hell."

"I don't care what it is," she answered, "so long as it is the reality,
and you let me know you as I do underneath my blindness and ignorance."

Then he told her. He talked to her as he would have talked to the dead
had she risen, although without losing his sense of her identity for a
moment, or the consciousness of the danger of the experiment. He showed
her what few mortals have seen, a naked soul with its scars, its stains,
and its ravages from flame and convulsion. He need not have apprehended
a disastrous result. She was compounded of his essences, and her age was
that indeterminate mixture of everlasting youth and anticipated wisdom
which is the glory and the curse of genius. She listened intently, the
expression of torment displaced by normal if profound sympathy. He had
begun with the passions inspired by Jefferson;