“Plainly they have never plagued you much!” rejoined Donal laughing. “But how often have you gone up and down these walks at dead of night?”
“Never once,” answered Miss Graeme, not without a spark of indignation. “I never was so absurd!”
“Then there may be a whole night-world that you know nothing about. You cannot tell that the place is not then thronged with ghosts: you have never given them a chance of appearing to you. I don’t say it is so, for I know nothing, or at least little, about such things. I have had no experience of the sort any more than you—and I have been out whole nights on the mountains when I was a shepherd.”
“Why then should you trouble your fancy about them?”
“Perhaps just for that reason.”
“I do not understand you.”
“I mean, because I can come into no communication with such a world as may be about me, I therefore imagine it. If, as often as I walked abroad at night, I met and held converse with the disembodied, I should use my imagination little, but make many notes of facts. When what may be makes no show, what more natural than to imagine about it? What is the imagination here for?”
“I do not know. The less one has to do with it the better.”
“Then the thing, whatever it be, should not be called a faculty, but a weakness!”
“Yes.”