“He’s scairt,” she teased, before he had fairly started to speak. “You don’t trust yourself or me.”
Laughing, he retorted: “That’s another!”
“You are right to be careful,” she went on, serious again. “It’s a dangerous adventure, unless you keep your balance, follow your own purpose, keep close tab on the force handling the pencil, and lean on it only spiritually. The minute advice in material things is sought, that minute there is danger.”
“There’s no danger that anybody can impersonate you and fool me,” he declared.
“Never! The danger is that somebody might lie to you about me; or if you cease to stand on your own feet and make your own choice in matters of your plane, only then somebody might impersonate me for a moment. Sometimes I can tell you those things, but the habit of depending on them is bad for you.”
A night or two later, beginning with a reply to a question concerning another subject, she returned to the discussion of the force used in conveying these communications—“a force compared to which electricity is like spring water,” she said—declaring, like Frederick, that its explanation is still impossible in terms of our plane.
“There is a vital and potent force, not yet isolated—and hardly discovered—by your most advanced scientists,” she told us. “It has characteristics and attractions not explainable until its discovery and analysis give rise to a new set of words. There is no adequate comparison that may be used to indicate its force, or the conditions and degrees of its variations. It has some resemblance to electricity, yet the comparison in certain cases would be misleading.”
“I am talking about the force we use in moving this pencil, and to some extent in affecting your thought,” she continued, when Mr. Kendal had mentioned certain recent scientific experiments of which he had read. “The scientists have long associated the power of thought with the brain, and have seriously argued that, as we could not be seen, measured, weighed, or condensed, we did not exist. We do. And we have a force at our command that cannot be explained, as yet. It can only occasionally be demonstrated as clearly as this. Electricity is the most likely to impress the man in the street as a comparison, but to argue from that as a premise would lead to misconception. At present, it must be accepted as a recognized but not understood force, only dimly perceived, as for years electricity was.”
“Does it help, if we emphasize what we know of static electricity, as well as thinking of the comparison in terms of electric current? A static force in your plane, perhaps?”
“Yes, that helps; but the static force is in your plane, quite as much as here. We have more knowledge of the current, to continue the simile, but encounter static conditions both here and there, as well as counter currents here.”