I faced the whole question, "dispassionately."
What were the facts? Years ago, a sentimental and unhappy child had, in a moment of crude (though not contemptible) romantic fervour, grown morbidly fond of another child, and he of her. They had vowed together to seek to perpetuate their experience when away from each other by mutual self-suggestion, especially on that particular night of every year when the childish emotion had culminated. It was all very pretty, quite pathetic too in its way, but what else?
What else? Everything. These were the cowardly picturings of Common-Sense: Heart put them swiftly to flight. The only realities are the realities of the spirit, and Robbie in the visions I now had, not only every Christmas, but every day—near every hour—was a warm divine reality in my soul. He was with me, kissing my face. Where the human body of the living twenty-one-year-old Robbie might be I did not know—though I constructed for myself a hundred different stories as to his whereabouts and doings—but that his spirit was with me whenever mine was with him I knew in the authentic uttermost way, beyond all knowledge and reason, in which I had once known God. Sometimes the whole night through his Presence enveloped me, his face was mirrored in my soul. Yet always the ultimate Rapture evaded me; I would reach the mystical moment when the lips of the vision-Robbie upon mine were changing into the dear desired lips of the real-life Robbie, when vision-reality and this-world-reality were merging magically into one—then always, on the threshold of realization, the Vision faded, and I was left empty and desolate and cold.
The mere physical longing, though less intense than the spiritual, was newer and more baffling: for I understood my body much less well than my soul. Oh for him to put his arms around me, crush me tenderly to him, while I should clasp him to my breast and pour out my heart upon him! I would kiss the miserable pillow (and say it was his throat) and clasp it and cover it with tears. When bearing-point was passed, I would burst into half-hysterical prayer: Send him now, oh Lord Jesus, or banish the tormenting vision from my eyes!—the while I would savagely stop the eyes and ears of my spirit, until God's answer came, and for a space the hunger passed away.
Doubt trod hard upon Desire. Fool-Mary as always! You loved the little boy then, and he you. It was a child's moment, gracious for the child's sorrow that it eased, but over at once and for ever. Love comes not back again. All the rest, all these fantastic years of mystical repeatal are but the wraiths of your own disordered imagination. The Presence is a phantom presence of your own creating.
"It is no phantom," I replied. "If anything in God's universe is real, that is real."
"Real to him? For if not, the presence is not real at all."
"It is real to him."
"Are you so sure? You are quite, quite certain: that at the same moment in which you possess his Presence, he is possessing yours?"