"The Deva world," he said briefly, after a pause. "Probably he's come to take Nayan off with him. She—I always said so—has a strong strain of the elemental kingdom in her. She may be his Devi. LeVallon, I'm sure, is here for the first time. He's one of the non-human evolution. He's slipped in. A Deva himself probably." It was as though he said that the waiter was Swiss or French, or that the proprietor's daughter had Italian blood in her.
Povey looked round him with an air of triumph.
"Ah!" he announced, as who should say, "You all thought my version a bit wild, but here's confirmation from an unbiased witness."
"Oh, well, I can't be certain," Imson reminded the group. If he deceived them enough to change their lives in any respect, it involved fresh Karma for himself. Care was indicated. "I can't be positive, can I?" he hedged. "Only—I must say—the great deva-figures I've seen in dream have exactly that look and expression."
"That's interesting, Pat," Povey put in, "because, before you came, I was suggesting a similar explanation for his air of immense potential power. The elemental atmosphere he brought—we all noticed it, of course."
"Elemental is the only word," Miss Lance inserted. "A great Nature Being." She was thinking of her magazine. "He struck me as being so close to Nature that he seemed literally part of it."
"That would explain the lightning and the strange cry he gave about 'messengers,'" replied Imson, wiping the oil from his chin and sprinkling his petit suisse with powdered sugar. "It's quite likely enough."
"I wish you'd jot down what you think—a little report of what you saw and felt," the Secretary mentioned. "It would be of great value. I thought of making a collection of the different versions and accounts."
"They might be published some day," thought Miss Lance. "Let's all," she added aloud with emphasis.
Imson nodded agreement, making no audible reply, while the conversation ran on, gathering impetus as it went, growing wilder possibly, but also more picturesque. A man in the street, listening behind a curtain, must have deemed the talkers suffering from delusion, mad; a good psychologist, on the other hand, similarly screened, and knowing the antecedent facts, the Studio scene, at any rate, must have been struck by one outstanding detail—the effect, namely, upon one and all of the person they discussed. They had seen him for an hour or so among a crowd, a young man whose name they hardly knew; only a few had spoken to him; there had been, it seemed, neither time nor opportunity for him to produce upon one and all the impression he undoubtedly had produced. For in every mind, upon every heart, LeVallon's mere presence had evidently graven an unforgettable image, scored an undecipherable hieroglyph. Each felt, it seemed, the hint of a personality their knowledge could not explain, nor any earthly explanation satisfy. The consciousness in each one, perhaps, had been quickened. Hence, possibly, the extravagance of their conversation. Yet, since all reported differently, collective hysteria seemed discounted.