Page:Across the Stream.djvu/153

Rh allowing the subconscious self to pass the portals where normally the conscious self kept guard, and to do its errand.

So far there was nothing to disquiet her or make her uncomfortable. It was, as she had said, "just thought-reading," an example of a purely natural law, which, however dimly understood, was fully admitted by scientific investigators. No one, except the most hide-bound of pedants, questioned the existence of the subconscious self, and, if here was an example of an abnormal development of it, still there was nothing to fight shy of. She had asked for a proof of its powers, and undeniably she had got it.…

But Archie had gone far beyond that in his exposition of the powers of the subconscious self, and it was this which caused her a very vivid disquiet. Through the subconscious self, in those who had the gift of releasing it, of allowing its activities, could come, so he believed, communications from the individual consciousnesses which had passed out of the material world. Even as the subconscious self could get into touch with the thoughts of living people (as she had seen for herself that afternoon), so also could it get into touch with the thoughts of the dead. It was thus, so Archie announced, that when he was a mere child, and knew nothing whatever of conscious and subconscious selves, Martin, the brother whom he had never heard of, used his hand to write with, as if it was his own, and with it wrote in the handwriting which had been his. Jessie fully believed in the survival of personality; to her the so-called dead had but passed on to a further and higher plane of existence; but there was to her something inexplicably repugnant in the notion that they could come back, and speak or write to those who still lived on this plane of existence.

Jessie lingered late by her window, overlooking the bay, trying to disentangle and lay bare the roots of her