“A most curious performance,” she murmured; “an exhibition I never want to see again.”
“The most curious part,” replied the doctor coolly, “was its truth.”
“Its truth!” she exclaimed beneath her breath. She was frightened by something in his voice and by the uncommon gravity in his eyes. It seemed to arrest her intelligence. She felt upon the edge of things beyond her. “You mean that Binovitch did for a moment—hang—in the air?” The other verb, the right one, she could not bring herself to use.
The great man’s face was enigmatical. He talked to her sympathy, perhaps, rather than to her mind.
“Real genius,” he said smilingly, “is as rare as talent, even great talent, is common. It means that the personality, if only for one second, becomes everything; becomes the universe; becomes the soul of the world. It gets the flash. It is identified with the universal life. Being everything and everywhere, all is possible to it—in that second of vivid realisation. It can brood with the crystal, grow with the plant, leap with the animal, fly with the bird: genius unifies all three. That is the meaning of ‘creative.’ It is faith. Knowing it, you can pass through fire and not be burned, walk on water and not sink, move a mountain, fly. Because you are fire, water, earth, air. Genius, you see, is madness in the magnificent sense of being superhuman. Binovitch has it.”
He broke off abruptly, seeing he was not understood. Some great enthusiasm in him he deliberately suppressed.
“The point is,” he resumed, speaking more carefully, “that we must try to lead this passionate constructive genius of the man into some human channel that will absorb it, and therefore render it harmless.”
“He loves Vera,” the woman said, bewildered, yet seizing this point correctly.
“But would he marry her?” asked Plitzinger at once.
“He is already married.”