"Your feeling, anyhow?" insisted his friend. "Your general feeling?"
"A general judgment based on general feeling," said the other in a quiet tone, "has little value. It is based, necessarily, as you know, upon intuition, which I temperamentally dislike. It has no facts to go upon. I distrust generalizations." He took a deep breath, inhaled a lot of smoke, exhaled it with relief, and made an effort. It went against the grain in him to be caught without an explanation.
"'N. H.' in my opinion, and so far as my limited observation of him——"
Fillery allowed himself a laugh of amused impatience. "Leave out the personal extras for once, and burn your bridges. Tell me finally what you think about 'N. H.' We're not scoring points now."
Thus faced with an alternative, Devonham found his sense of humour again and forgot himself. It cost him an effort, but he obeyed the bigger and less personal mind.
"I really don't know exactly what he is," he confessed again. "He puzzles me completely. It may be"—he shrugged his shoulders, compelled by his temperament to hedge—"that he represents, as I first thought, the content of his parents' minds, the subsequent addition of Mason's mind included."
"That's possible, usual and comprehensible enough," put in the doctor, watching him with amused concentration, but with an inner excitement scarcely concealed.
"Or" resumed Devonham, "it may be that through these——"
"Through his mental inheritance from his parents and from Mason, yes——"
"——he taps the most primitive stores and layers of racial memory we know. The world-memory, if I dare put it so, full proof being lacking, is open to him——"