And she listened motionless, her eyes bright and eager, her lips shut together, her slim body a-quiver with intensity, mental and physical.
"How can it?" Valentine went on. "What is a soul without a body? You cannot see it. You cannot hear it, and if you think you can, that is a vile trick of the mind, an hallucination. For if one man can see it, why not another? Here, let me look into your eyes again."
As he said the last words, he stopped opposite to Cuckoo, suddenly caught her chin in his two hands, which felt hard and cold, and forcibly pushed up her face towards his. She was terrified, beginning now to think him mad, and to fear personal injury. Gazing hard and furtively into her eyes, he said:
"No; it's a lie! It is not there. It never was! It is dead and finished with, and I won't fear it."
As if struck by the fatigue of some sudden reaction, he sank down again into his chair, and went on with his apparently fantastic monologue:
"And if it was ever alive, what could it do? A soul can't work, except through a body; it must fasten on a body, and bend the body to its will—man is such a creature that he can only be influenced through flesh and blood, nerves, sinews, eyes, things he can see, things that he can hear. He is so grovelling that nothing more delicate than these really appeals to him."
Again, and this time with less abstraction, and with a sort of contemptuous humour, he turned to the lady of the feathers, and continued, as if once more aware of her presence:
"Are you imbibing my gospel, the gospel of will and of influence? I see you are by your pretty attitude and by the engaging face you are making at me. Well, don't get it wrong. A gospel gone wrong in a mind is dangerous, and worse than no gospel at all. If you get this gospel wrong you may become conceited, and fancy yourself possessed of a power which you haven't a notion of. To use will in any really affective way, you must train your body, and take care of it, not ruin it, and let it run to seed, or grow disfigured, or a ghastly tell-tale, a truth-teller, a town-crier with a big bell going about and calling aloud all the silly or criminal things you do. Now you have forgotten this, or perhaps you never knew it, and so will could not work in you; not even, I believe, a malign will to do mischief. You have thrown your body to the wolves, and whoever looks upon you must see the marks of their teeth."
It was evident that he gloated on this idea that the body of the lady of the feathers was forever useless for good, and even powerless to do much effective evil. He seemed to revel in the notion that she was simply a thing powerless, negative, and totally vain.
"I was mad ever to imagine the contrary," he said. Then, glancing away from personality, he exclaimed with more energy: