His phrase was luminous to her. It was a violent rent that opened up the darkness that wrapped her.
"If you could see through it you'd understand, you'd see that this body, made of the radiant dust of the universe, is a two-fold medium, transmitting the splendour of the universe to us, and our splendour to the universe; that we carry about in every particle of us a spiritual germ which is not the spiritual germ of our father or our mother or any of our remote ancestors; so that what we take is insignificant beside what we give."
Laura looked grave. "I can't pretend for a moment," she said, "that I understand."
"Think," he said, "think of the body of a new-born baby; think how before its birth that body ran through the whole round of creation in nine months, that not only the life of its parents, but the life of the whole creation was present in the cell it started from. Think how our body comes charged with spiritual energies, indestructible instincts, infinite memories that are not ours; that its life, from minute to minute, goes on by a process of combustion, the explosion of untamable forces, and that we—we—unmake the work of millions of æons in a moment, that we charge it with our will, our instincts, our memories, so that there's not an atom of our flesh unpenetrated by spirit, not a cell of our bodies that doesn't hold some spiritual germ of us—so that we multiply our souls in our bodies; and their dust, when they scatter, is the seed of our universe, flung heaven knows where."
For a moment the clever imp looked out of Laura's eyes. "Do you know," she said, "it makes me feel as if I had millions and millions of intoxicated brains, all trying to grasp something, and all reeling, and I can't tell whether it's you who are intoxicated, or I. And I want to know how you know about it."
A change passed over his face. It became suddenly still and incommunicable.
"And the only thing I want to know," she wailed, "you won't tell me, and it's all very dim and disagreeable and sad."
"What won't I tell you?"
"What's become of the things that made Papa so adorable?"
"I've been trying to tell you. I've been trying to make you see."