“Look after her? What do you mean?”
“Well, she is obviously insane.”
“On the contrary, she is the most subtle exponent we have of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine. Eccentric, [90] ]perhaps, but as lucid a brain as Mr G. R. S. Mead’s or as Colonel Olcott’s. You should get her to describe your aura. She is excellent, too, in Plato. She doesn’t understand a word of Greek, but she gets at his meaning intuitively. There is something cosmic about her. You know what I mean.”
“Oh, quite, quite.” (But what did she mean?)
“Cosmic consciousness is a most enthralling subject,” continued my hostess, digging the hockey-stick she always carried with her well into the hearthrug. “Walt Whitman had it, you know.”
“Badly?” I inquired.
She appeared puzzled.
“I don’t quite know what you mean by ‘badly.’ He could identify himself with anything—the wind, a stone, a jelly-fish, an arm-chair, a ... a ... oh, everything! They were he and he was they. He thought cosmically. Fourth dimension, you know. Edward Carpenter and all that.”
I rather admired this way she had of talking—a little like the Duke in G. K. Chesterton’s Magic.
“Oh, do go on!” I urged her.