“You are right. It is for heaven’s sake that I want you to do it; for there is a heaven, and it belongs on earth,” said Ethel, slowly. “I believe it is only the organs at the base of his brain which are exhausted; and as they are nearly deadened, he seems like a fool to people who can only use their lower brain, which is the seat of the senses and passions—but—”
“Do you mean that as I am not alert on those spiritual planes which arouse themselves in this ghostly way with him, and as he cannot use his common-sense faculties, which are alert enough in me, I probably seem to him to be as much of an idiot as he to me seems to be?”
“I mean you have no common ground to meet upon just now. Not, however, that you are unspiritual, but because your nature is so closely knitted up, that you act and think as a well-constructed entity, dealing with entities, not with fragments.”
“Well, we never did have any common ground,” said Mrs. Mancredo, just as Judge Elkhorn came on the scene. And then her mind took hold of the fact that if she could not get along with Reginald as a whole, she certainly did not want to deal with the ghastly fragments of him which seemed left. And this she told Ethel.
“He never has been mentally whole,” said Ethel. “He is gathering up his fragments;” said Ethel. “Don’t you want to help him?”
Then Mrs. Mancredo gave Judge Elkhorn a crude version of the story, appealing from Ethel to him, concerning the whole business, in a way which some women have; not because they are going to act on the advice they may receive, but because they understand themselves better after hearing themselves “talk out the whole problem.”
Judge Elkhorn was a bright man in many regards, and had had an ambition to electrify the world with a theory which would give a new basis for action in reforms; but in dealing with such a case as this, he had certain serious limitations. For he prided himself on never going beyond the common-sense recognition of objects which he could taste, touch, feel, smell and see. But here was Reginald with the common-sense plane of mind (that is, the plane of mind on which practical people live externally and meet each other) terribly damaged, and with three out of five sense-avenues to knowledge, shut up. And yet Miss Ethelbert claimed he was living in a rather select sort of world of his own, after a tranquil fashion; not devoid of certain startling gleams of intelligence, nay, wisdom. But as for an unseen world, and “an education beyond the grave,” Judge Elkhorn was pleased to say, “he hoped he had left all faith in that sort of thing along with fear of spooks and the dark.” He was willing to call Reginald’s state “a curious phenomenon.” For the rest, he would have liked to have relegated this man to the obscurity of some asylum. For if he disliked Reginald when he was well (?) and obtrusively at home on Ethelbert’s balcony the day they first met, he disliked him vastly more now that he, as a child, was ensconced on Ethelbert’s attention.
Judge Elkhorn thought the whole thing preposterous; and notwithstanding his fine humanitarian theories for helping misery in the mass, he would have liked to take prompt steps to hinder its being served up in individual cases, in polite society. He quite laid down the law on this subject to Miss Daksha, and interposed his particular likes and dislikes as if they were the code of the Medes and Persians. Ethel let him proceed. But she held to her faith in the final rehabilitation of Reginald, and expressed it.
So, in language of his own, Judge Elkhorn at last reassured her that her concern for this case was really unfitting.
“Who being judge?” said she.