“Your extraordinary resignation—your still more extraordinary way of proclaiming it!”
“I don't think those were disasters.”
“But my dear Sir!”
“You don't want to discuss theology with me, I know. So let me tell you simply that from my point of view the illumination that came to me—this drug of Dr. Dale's helping—has been the great release of my life. It crystallized my mind. It swept aside the confusing commonplace things about me. Just for a time I saw truth clearly.... I want to do so again.”
“Why?”
“There is a crisis in my affairs—never mind what. But I cannot see my way clear.”
Dr. Brighton-Pomfrey was meditating now with his eyes on his carpet and the corners of his mouth tucked in. He was swinging his glasses pendulum-wise. “Tell me,” he said, looking sideways at Scrope, “what were the effects of this drug? It may have been anything. How did it give you this—this vision of the truth—that led to your resignation?”
Scrope felt a sudden shyness. But he wanted Dale's drug again so badly that he obliged himself to describe his previous experiences to the best of his ability.
“It was,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone, “a golden, transparent liquid. Very golden, like a warm-tinted Chablis. When water was added it became streaked and opalescent, with a kind of living quiver in it. I held it up to the light.”
“Yes? And when you took it?”