"No, dear, but hundreds, thousands, are learning in preparation for that moment of choice—the falseness and futility of material possessions."
"That is a good thought—an incorruptible kind of optimism!" Paula exclaimed.... "You think this Bellingham has made the evil choice?"
"Yes. Long ago."
"Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have conquered the flesh."
"Yes."
"But you depict him—I find him—Desire Incarnate!"
"Exactly, Paula, because he has reverted. The animal controls his mind, not the soul. Bellingham is retracing his way back to chaos, with a human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the ages, he has drawn his forces, which to us are mystery. He uses these secret forces of Nature to prolong his own life—which is all he has. The mystic cord is severed within him. He is a body, nothing but a body—hence the passion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has learned—who knows how long ago?—to replenish his own vitality with that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know too well. He is kin with those creatures of legend, the loup-garou, the vampire. I tell you he is an insatiable sponge for human magnetism."
"Past all doubt, can't Bellingham turn back?" Paula asked tensely. "With all his worldly knowledge, and knowing his own doom, can he not turn back—far back, a lowly-organized soul, but on the human way?" Hopelessness, anywhere, was a blasting conception to her.
"No. I tell you he is a living coffin. There is nothing in him to energize a pure motive. He might give a fortune to the poor, but it would be for his own gain. He could not suffer for the poor, or love them. Dead within, he is detached from the great centres of virtue and purity—from all that carries the race forward, and will save us at the last. You see his frightful dependence upon this temporal physical instrument, since all the records of the past and the unwritten pages of the future are wiped out? Isn't it a sheer black horror, Paula,—to know that from the great tide of hopeful humanity, one is set apart; to know that the amazing force which has carried one from a cell in the ooze to thinking manhood must end with this red frightened heart; to be forced, for the continuance of life, to feed upon the strength of one woman after another—always fairer and finer——" The look of hatred in the speaker's face had become a banner of havoc.
"Can he not stop that kind of devouring?" Paula exclaimed. "Would there not be hope—if he battled with that—put that vampirism behind?"