There was a silence.
"Will you help me?"
She was pleading now.
The Oriental sparred for time. It was not his purpose to commit himself at once.
"I am but one who, long severed from the world, has long recognized its vanities. My cures are for the body rather than the soul."
Theodora's face hardened into an expression of scorn.
"Am I to understand that you will do nothing for me?" she said in a tone which convinced the Persian that the time for dallying was past.
The words came slowly from his lips.
"I can promise you neither self-oblivion nor visionary joys. I possess an internal force, it is true, a force which, under proper control, overpowers and subdues the material, and by exerting this I can, if I think it well to do so, release your soul, that inner intelligence which, deprived of its mundane matter, is yourself, from its house of clay and allow it a brief interval of freedom. But—what in that state its experience may be, whether joy or sorrow, I cannot foretell."
"Then you are not the master of the phantoms you evoke?"