Dineen had engineered the bringing of the semi-radical Van Maarden to Laurel....
"For such men are needed here ... to rouse us out of the petty, dogmatic ways of our crude pioneers...."
"Van Maarden is a remarkable man," continued Dineen; "he writes plays, poems, books of economic philosophy, novels ... recently he tried to start a co-operative colony for Dutch farmers in South Carolina, but it went on the rocks ... and now Van Maarden, for all his genius, is practically stranded here in America.
"It is, or ought to be, one of the duties of an educational centre like Laurel, to aid such men ... men who travel about, disseminating ideas, carrying the torch of inspiration ... like Giordano Bruno, in former days."
Van Maarden came ... a little, dapper, black-bearded man ... but a very boy in his enthusiasm. He advanced many doctrines at variance with even the political radicalism of Kansas.
But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....
Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....
Dineen, Van Maarden and I were together much. And the latter found more delight in the time when he could discuss freely and unacademically with me than when he was invited to formal teas and dinners by the weightier members of the faculty and community.
It was psychic research that we particularly discussed. Van Maarden was the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that I have ever met. He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and see what any friend was up to at any time, in any out-of-the-way place in the world....
When I jested that such a faculty might sometimes prove embarrassing to his friends, he laughed and slapped me on the back.