uman will. Whether it is produced by some subconscious but
still human force, or by some powers, good, bad, or indifferent,
which are external to humanity, I would not myself attempt to decide.
The only thing I will say with complete confidence, about that mystic
and invisible power, is that it tells lies. The lies may be larks or
they may be lures to the imperilled soul or they may be a thousand
other things; but whatever they are, they are not truths about the
other world; or for that matter about this world.*

[*_Autobiography_, p. 77.]

He told Father O'Connor some years later* that "he had used the
planchette freely at one time, but had to give it up on account of
headaches ensuing . . . 'after the headaches came a horrid feeling as
if one were trying to get over a bad spree, with what I can best
describe as a bad smell in the mind.'"

[*_Father Brown on Chesterton,_ p. 74.]

Idling at his work he fell in with other idlers and has left a vivid
description in a _Daily News_ article called, "The Diabolist," of one
of his fellow students.

. . . It was strange, perhaps, that I liked his dirty, drunken
society; it was stranger still, perhaps, that he liked my society.
For hours of the day he would talk with me about Milton or Gothic
architecture; for hours of the night he would go where I have no wish
to follow him, even in speculation. He was a man with a long,
ironical face, and close red hair; he was by class a gentleman, and
could walk like one, but preferred, for some reason, to walk like a
groom carrying two pails. He looked like a sort of super-jockey; as
if some archangel had gone on the Turf. And I shall never forget the
half-hour in which he and I argued about real things for the first
and last time.

. . . He had a horrible fairness of the intellect that made me
despair of his soul. A common, harmless atheist would have denied
that religion produced humility or humility a simple joy; but he
admitted both. He only said, "But shall I not find in evil a life of
its own? Granted that for every woman I ruin one of those red sparks
will go out; will not the expanding pleasure of ruin . . ."

"Do you see that fire?" I asked. "If we had a real fighting
democracy, some one would burn you in it; like the devil-worshipper
that you are."

"Perhaps," he said, in his tired, fair way. "Only what you call
evil I call good."