"I don't understand."
Flamby snuggled her knees up tighter against her round chin and stared wistfully straight before her. A ray from the afternoon sun intruded through the window and touched her wonderful hair into magic flame. "Paul has altered the lives of a lot of people, hasn't he?" she asked.
"He has. I cannot doubt that he will become the centre of a world-wide movement. I received a letter only two days ago from a man who was with us at Oxford, and who entered the Church, assuring me that he had only awaited such a lead to resign his office and seek independently to spread the true doctrine. He is only one of many. I know several Army chaplains who have been troubled with serious doubts for years. They will rally to Paul as the Crusaders rallied to Peter the Hermit."
"I read his book," said Flamby, still staring unseeingly before her, "and something inside myself told me that every word of it was true. I know that I have lived before, everybody knows it, but everybody isn't able to realise it. Dad told me that re-incarnation was the secret of life once when I asked him who his father was. He said, 'Never mind about that. Damn your ancestors!...' Oh! I didn't mean to say it! But, really he said that. 'It is your spiritual ancestry that counts,' he told me. 'There are plenty of noble blackguards, and it wasn't his parents who made a poet of Keats.' Dad convinced me in a wonderful way. He pointed out that a child born of a fine cultured family and one whose father was a thief and his mother something worse didn't start level at all. One was handicapped before he had the sense to think for himself; 'before he weighed in,' was how dad put it. 'If there is a just God,' he said—'and every man finds out sooner or later that there is, to his joy or to his sorrow—there are no unfair handicaps. It wouldn't be racing. Why should an innocent baby be born with the diseases and deformities of it's parents? Why should some be born blind?' What he called 'the hell-fire and brimstone' theory used to make him sick. He considered that most missionaries ought to be publicly executed, and said that in the Far East where he had lived you could see their work 'like the trail of a tin tabernacle across a blasted heath.' That sounds like swearing, but it's Shakespeare."
"I don't see," said Don, as Flamby became silent, "what this has to so with Paul's misjudgment of you, or your misjudgment of Paul. It simply means that you agree with him. You are such an extraordinarily clever girl, and have had so extraordinary a training, that I cannot pass lightly by anything you say seriously. What has led you to believe that Paul thinks ill of you, and why does it worry you that I think him incapable of such a thing?"
Flamby absently flicked cigarette ash upon the carpet. "According to The Gates," she said, speaking very slowly and evidently seeking for words wherewith to express her meaning, "everybody's sorrows and joys and understanding or lack of understanding are exactly in proportion to the use they have made of their opportunities, not just in one life but in other lives before."
Don nodded without speaking.
"A man who had come as near to perfection as is possible in this world would have found his perfect mate, what Paul calls his 'Isis-self.'"
"Embodied, in Paul's case, in Yvonne."
"He would be in no doubt about it, and no more would she. If she was below him he would raise her, if she was above him he might marry, but he would not mistake another woman for the right one. And things that convinced other men would not convince a true initiate. So I am worried about Paul, because if he is not a true initiate, where did he learn the things that are in The Gates?"