What at breakfast had been the lithe and debonnair Gnani of Gingalee, a transparent and elegant gentleman, was now but a thick, cloudy shape, an opaque, formless figure, an unhandsome thing resembling the body of a bent, crooked and deformed child.
Bill Vanderhook was wildly elated.
He beamed upon the exhibit with satanic glee. He laughed for joy over the pallid and lifeless thing whirling under his hand. He emitted a low whistle of profound satisfaction. He made notes in his book with excited dots and dashes. At last his triumph broke all bounds. He roared like a whole grandstand at the last touchdown.
“I say, Genesy, that’s what you call a Neego on the home run. Get onto the size of him. Looks like ’leven cents, don’t he? Dollars to dimes he hasn’t enough mysticism left to illuminate a hollow punkin. The next Gooroo from Gingalee won’t run up against an Edison plant. If he does, he’ll find he isn’t the whole push. Just look at the shape of him. Now ain’t you stuck on that? And isn’t he just swinging round the circle like a presidential candidate? Well, well, well, I say, Genesy, if this don’t beat the tom-tom.”
The transformation of the mystic was sustaining the hypothesis of the materialist. The reduction of the astral man was a visible, tangible and scientific fact.
And Imogene, the faithless,—what did she? She gazed and shuddered. That which she saw was not her ideal. It was no longer her lover. Nor was it a man. It was not even suitable bric-a-brac for a refined home. It was only a Spectacle.
She did not speak. There are times when even a woman feels the advantages of silence. But she gazed upon her late admirer and then upon Bill. She had to acknowledge to her inner consciousness that her own husband cut much the better figure of the two.
Round and round swept the cylinder, its fierce currents and their fated victim.
The features of the mystic were no longer recognizable. The contortions and distortions of body, limbs and features were fearful. The external application of electricity and the internal throes of passion and pain have done their fatal work.
Again and again an increased current, regulated by the avenger, hastened in exact ratio the destruction of the astral man.