Her arms were about my neck in a trice, and she spoke in my ear; "Yes, Alfred, tonight, in the library. Come. It will be my seance—and yours too. Our spirits are in tune. We will roll back the visible and see the invisible. The substantial shall become the transubstantial, and the diverse, one."
This language was the only indication, at the moment, that I possibly could have regarded as idiotic—in the common sense—and I was half inclined to believe that Gabrielle—not without fun and humour—meant to bewilder me with it, as a joke.
Would I come? "Yes certainly," and so I left her, wonderingly, as I passed to my room, recalling that utterly impossible fiction in an English book written by an artist, called, as I remember it, The Martian. I shuddered a little when I closed the door of my room, and sank back in an easy chair, to grapple with a now peculiar problem. Should Gabrielle be permitted to live in this world of spiritual essences, and apparitions any longer?
I think that I was not disinclined to live in it myself, but with me the material stringency of affairs was unmistakable, and I did, spasmodically at least, revolt against this extreme spiritualism. I hunted along my book-shelves, and found the Martian book, and chasing through its pages I stopped at this incomprehensible passage:
"For when the life of the body ceases and the body itself is burned and its ashes scattered to the winds and waves, the infinitesimal, imponderable, and indestructible something we call the soul is known to lose itself in a sunbeam and make for the sun, with all its memories about it, that it may then receive further development fitting it for other systems altogether beyond conception."
And then came the intolerable fancy of these Martian souls getting into the bodies of animals, and into men and women, and how the particular Martia influenced the divine Englishman, and made him write wonderful transforming books, and he thought of a life
"where arabesques of artificial light and interwoven curves of subtle sound had a significance undreamt of by mortal eyes or ears, and served as conductors to a heavenly bliss unknown to earth."
I fell into a stupor of meditation. Might not Blanchette do such things for me? Her image sprang to my eyes, her voice sounded in my ears, her arms embraced me, the very fragrance of her person enchanted my nostrils, and then, as the stupor passed, and the dying day sent the broad beams of the sun full into my face, I rose, and, feeling with a sudden particularity of certitude, the absolute hopelessness of fancies, of dreams, of anything but work, with my own life broken at its very beginning, and the overshadowing pall of an unforgettable disaster shrouding it from corner to corner, I sank to my couch, and, stretched along its length, wept bitterly.