Moonchild

pounds in the medium's pocket; but even if it happened, proof of survival would still be lacking. Clairvoyance, telepathy, guesswork-there are plenty of alternative explanations. "Then there is the elaborate method of cross-correspondences: I won't bore you with that; Brother Cyril will have plenty of time to talk to you at Naples." Lisa sat up with a shock. Despite her interest in the subject, her brain had tired. The last words galvanized her. "I shall explain after lunch," continued the mystic, lighting a third Partaga; "meanwhile, I have wandered slightly from the subject, as you were too polite to remark. I was going to show you how a soul with a weak hold on its tenant could be expelled by another; how, indeed, half-a-dozen personalities could take turns to live in one body. That they are [29] real, independent souls is shown by the fact that not only do the contents of the mind differ — which might conceivably be a fake but their handwritings, their voices, and that in ways which are quite beyond anything we know in the way of conscious simulation, or even possible simulation. "These personalities are constant quantities; they depart and return unchanged. It is then sure that they do not exist merely by manifestation; they need no body for existence." "You are coming back to the theory of possession, like the Gadarene swine," cried Lisa, delighted. she could hardly say why. Cyril Grey interrupted the conversation for the first time. He swung round in his arm chair, and deliberately cleared his throat while he refixed his eyeglass. "In these days," he observed, "when devils enter into swine, they do not rush violently down a steep place. They call themselves moral reformers, and vote the Prohibition ticket." He shut up with a snap, swung his chair round again, and returned to the study of his big square book. "I hope you realize," remarked Simon Iff, "what you have let yourself in for?" Lisa blushed laughingly. "You have set me at my ease. I should certainly never know how to talk to him." "Always talk," observed Cyril Grey, without looking up. "Words! Words! Words! It's an awful thing to be Hamlet when Ophelia takes after Polonius. She wants to know how to talk to me! And I want to teach her to be silent — even as the friend of Catullus turned his uncle into a statue of Harpocrates." "Oh yes! I know Harpocrates, the Egyptian God of Silence," gushed the