He went to Gerald's room, moved by a sudden impulse. Gerald was demonstrating one of his theories concerning mind pictures and found in the professor a smiling and tolerant listener.
He was saying: "Now, let us suppose that from youth up a child has looked into its mother's face, felt her touch, heard her voice; that his senses carried to that forming brain their sensations, each nerve touching the brain, and with minute force setting up day by day, month by month, and year by year a model. Yes, go back further and remember that this was going on before the child was a distinct individual; we have the creative force in both stages! Tell me, is it impossible then that this little brain shall grow into the likeness it carries as its most serious impression, and that forced to the effort would on canvas or in its posterity produce the picture it has made——"
"How can you distinguish the mind picture from the memory picture? What is the difference?"
"Not easily, but if I can produce a face which comes to me in my dreams, which haunts my waking hours, which is with me always, the face of one I have never seen, it must come to me as a mind picture; and if that picture is the feminine of my own, have I not reason to believe that it stands for the creative power from which I sprang? Such a picture as this."
He drew a little curtain aside and on the wall shone the fair face of a woman; the face from the church sketch, but robbed of its terror, the counterpart of the little painting upstairs. The professor looked grave, but Edward gazed on it in awe.
"Now a simple brain picture," he said, almost in a whisper; "draw me the face of John Morgan."
The artist made not more than twenty strokes of the crayon upon the blackboard.
"Such is John Morgan, as I last saw him," said Gerald; "a mere photograph; a brain picture!"
Edward gazed from one to the other; from the picture to the artist astounded. The professor had put on his glasses; it was he who broke the silence.
"That is Herr Abingdon," he said. Gerald smiled and said: