"It destroys the 'sight,'" explained the former. "Alcohol sets up coarse vibrations that ruin clairvoyance."
"I decided to deny myself till the war is over," was Mrs. Towzer's reason, and when Povey reminded her of the armistice, she mentioned that Turkey hadn't "signed yet."
"I think his soul——" began Miss Lance.
"If he has a soul," put in Povey, electrically.
"—is hardly in his body at all," concluded Miss Lance, less convincingly than originally intended.
"It was love at first sight. His sign is Fire and hers is Air," Miss Milligan said. "That's certain. Of course they came together."
"A clear case of memory, at any rate," insisted Kempster. "Two old souls meeting again for the first time for thousands of years, probably. Love at first sight, or hate, for that matter, is always memory, isn't it?" He disliked the astrology explanation; it was not mysterious enough, too mathematical and exact to please him.
"Secondary personalities are invariably memories of former selves, of course," agreed young Dickson, the theosophist, who was on the verge now of becoming a psycho-analyst and had already discarded Freud for Jung. "If not memories of past lives, then they're desires suppressed in this one."
"The less you think, the more you know," suggested Miss Lance. She distrusted intellect and believed that another faculty, called instinct or intuition, according to which word first occurred to her, was the way to knowledge. She was about to quote Bergson upside down, when Povey, foreseeing an interval of boredom, took command:
"One thing we know, at any rate," he began judiciously; "we aren't the only beings in the universe. There are non-human intelligences, both vast and small. The old world-wide legends can't be built on nothing. In every age of history—the reports are universal—we have pretty good evidence for other forms of life than humans——"