CHAPTER VII
"Well, now your whim has been gratified, I should like to know what you think of Francis Symeon?" Claude Rutherford asked, as he put down his hat in Vera's sanctum, the day after her conference with the high priest of occultism.
The question was his only greeting. He slipped into the low and spacious chair by the hearth, and seemed to lose himself in it, while he waited for a reply. He had the air of being perfectly at home in the room, with no idea that he could possibly be unwelcome. He came and went in Madame Provana's house with a lazy insouciance that many people would have taken for indifference. Only the skilled reader of men would have detected the hidden fire under that outward serenity of the attractive man, who flirts with any attractive woman of his acquaintance, and cares for none.
"I think he is wonderful."
"And you believe in him?"
"Yes, I believe in him, because his ideas only give form and substance to the thoughts that have haunted me ever since I began to think."
"Grisly thoughts?"
"No, Claude; happy thoughts. When I first read my father's poetry and began to think about him—in my dull grey room in Grannie's lodgings—I had a feeling that he was near me. He was there; but behind the veil. When I read 'In Memoriam' the feeling grew stronger, and I knew that death is not the end of love. There was nothing that shocked or startled me in what Mr. Symeon told me yesterday."
"About 'Us,' the spiritual club, in which the dead and the living are members on the same footing? The club that elects, or selects, Confucius or Browning one day, and Lady Fanny Ransom—mad Lady Fanny as they call her—the next?"