They did not yet, either of them, dare to be open, brutal, forthright.
"I could declare, I suppose," Vanlief went on, "that it was somewhat your own fault. You chose your victims badly. You have, I presume, been disenchanted. You found little that was beautiful, many things that were despicable. The spectacles you borrowed have all turned out smoky. Yet, consider—there are sure to be just as many rosy spectacles as dark ones in the world."
"No doubt," assented Vane, though without enthusiasm, "but there are still—the consequences. There is still the chance that I could never repay the soul I take on loan; still the horror of being left to face the rest of my days with a cuckoo in my brain. Mind, I have no reproaches, none at all. You overstated nothing. I have felt, have thought, have done as other men have felt and thought and done; their very inner secret souls have been completely in my keeping. The experiment has been a triumph. Yet it leaves me joyless."
"It has made me old," said Vanlief, simply. "Ah," he repeated, "if only I were younger!"
"The strain," he began again, "of putting an end to your last experiment has told on me. I overdid it. Such emotion, and such physical tension, is more than I should have attempted. I begin to fear I may not last very long. And in that case I think I shall have to take my secret with me. Orson, it comes to this; I am too old to perfect this marvelous thing to the point where it will be safe for humanity at large. It is still unsafe,—you will agree to that. You might wreck your own life and that of others. The chances are one in a thousand of your ever finding a human being whom God has so graciously endowed with the divine spirit as to be able to lose part of it without collapse. I have hoped and hoped, that such a thing would happen; then there would be two perfectly even, exactly tempered creatures; even if, upon that transfusion, the mirror disappeared, there would be no unhappiness as a reproach. But we have found nothing like that. You have embittered yourself; the glimpses of other souls you have had have almost stripped you of your belief in an eternal Good."
"You mean to send for the mirror?"
"It would be better, wiser. If I live, it will still be here. If I die, it must be destroyed. In any event—"
At the actual approach of this conclusion to his experiments Orson Vane felt a sense of coming loss. With all the dangers, all the loom of possible disaster, he was not yet rid of the awful fascination of this soul-snatching he had been engaged in.
"Perhaps," he argued, "my next experiment might find the one in a thousand you spoke of."
"I think you had better not try again. Tell me, what was Wantage's soul like?"