Lady Laura herself was not yet completely emancipated from what her friends sometimes called the graveclothes of so-called Revelation. To her it seemed a profound truth that things could be true and untrue simultaneously—that what might be facts on This Side, as she would have expressed it, might be falsehoods on the Other. She was accustomed, therefore, to attend All Saints’, Carlton Gardens, in the morning, and psychical drawing rooms or halls in the evening, and to declare to her friends how beautifully the one aspect illuminated and interpreted the other.
For the rest, she was a small, fair-haired woman, with penciled dark eyebrows, a small aquiline nose, gold pince-nez, and an exquisite taste in dress.
The two were seated this Tuesday evening, a week after Mrs. Stapleton’s visit to the Stantons, in the drawing room of the Queen’s Gate house, over the remnants of what corresponded to five-o’clock tea. I say “corresponded,” since both of them were sufficiently advanced to have renounced actual tea altogether. Mrs. Stapleton partook of a little hot water out of a copper-jacketed jug; her hostess of boiled milk. They shared their Plasmon biscuits together. These things were considered important for those who would successfully find the Higher Light.
At this instant they were discussing Mr. Vincent.
“Dearest, he seems to me so different from the others,” mewed Lady Laura. “He is such a man, you know. So often those others are not quite like men at all; they wear such funny clothes, and their hair always is so queer, somehow.”
“Darling, I know what you mean. Yes, there’s a great deal of that about James Vincent. Even dear Tom was almost polite to him: he couldn’t bear the others: he said that he always thought they were going to paw him.”
“And then his powers,” continued Lady Laura—“his powers always seem to me so much greater. The magnetism is so much more evident.”
Mrs. Stapleton finished her hot water.
“We are going on Sunday?” she said questioningly.
“Yes; just a small party. And he comes here tomorrow, you remember, just for a talk. I have asked a clergyman I know in to meet him. It seems to me such a pity that our religious teachers should know so little of what is going on.”
“Who is he?”
“Oh, Mr. Jamieson … just a young clergyman I met in the summer. I promised to let him know the next time Mr. Vincent came to me.”
Mrs. Stapleton murmured her gratification.
These two had really a great deal in common besides their faith. It is true that Mrs. Stapleton was forty, and her friend but thirty-one; but the former did all that was possible to compensate for this by adroit toilette tactics. Both, too, were accustomed to dress in soft materials, with long chains bearing various emblems; they did their hair in the same way; they cultivated the same kinds of tones in their voices—a purring, mewing manner—suggestive of intuitive kittens. Both alike had a passion for proselytism. But after that the differences began. There was a deal more in Mrs. Stapleton besides the kittenish qualities. She was perfectly capable of delivering a speech in public; she had written some really well-expressed articles in various Higher periodicals; and she had a willpower beyond the ordinary. At the point where Lady Laura began to deprecate and soothe, Mrs. Stapleton began to clear decks for action, so to speak, to be incisive, to be fervent, even to be rather eloquent. She kept “dear Tom,” the Colonel, not crushed or beaten, for that was beyond the power of man to do, but at least silently acquiescent in her program: he allowed her even to entertain her prophetical friends at his expense, now and then; and, even when among men, refrained from too bitter speech. It was said by the Colonel’s friends that Mrs. Colonel had a tongue of her own. Certainly, she ruled her house well and did her duty; and it was only because of her husband’s absence in Scotland that during this time she was permitting herself the refreshment of a week or two among the illuminated.
At about six o’clock Lady Laura announced her intention of retiring for her evening meditation. Opening out of her bedroom was a small dressing-room that she had fitted up for this purpose with all the broad suggestiveness that marks the Higher Thought: decked with ornaments emblematical of at least three religions, and provided with a faldstool and an exceedingly easy chair. It was here that she was accustomed to spend an hour before dinner, with closed eyes, emancipating herself from the fetters of sense; and rising to a due appreciation of that nothingness that was all, from which all came and to which it retired.
“I must go, dearest; it is time.”
A ring at the bell below made her pause.
“Do you think that can be Mr. Vincent?” she said, pleasantly apprehensive. “It’s not the right day, but one never knows.”
A footman’s figure entered.
“Mr. Baxter, my lady. … Is your ladyship at home?”
“Mr. Baxter—”
Mrs. Stapleton rose.
“Let me see him instead, dearest. … You remember … from Stantons.”
“I wonder what he wants?” murmured the hostess. “Yes, do see him, Maud; you can always fetch me if it’s anything.”
Then she was gone. Mrs. Stapleton sank into a chair again; and in a minute Laurie was shaking hands with her.
Mrs. Stapleton was accustomed to deal with young men, and through long habit had learned how to flatter them without appearing to do so. Laurie’s type, however, was less familiar to her. She preferred the kind that grow their hair rather long and wear turndown collars, and have just found out the hopeless banality of all orthodoxy whatever. She even bore with them when they called themselves unmoral. But she remembered Laurie, the silent boy at lunch last week, she
