Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/204

 “By the power of mind over mind. As a hypnotizer handles his lucide, so I handled Walla. Her consciousness was for the time obliterated. It was I who spoke.”

“Incomprehensible; but now I cannot doubt. Let us change the subject. Will you tell me your name?”

“Not now—it is not permitted—call me Hope.”

“Hope of the hour when I shall see you always?”

“That is it. You recognize my power over you, I perceive.”

“I feel as I never felt before in the presence of anyone, man or woman. It is not love as I have experienced love. It is rather a sense of completeness. I feel as if before I saw you I was but a fragment. I feel”

“Stay! You do not know yet the true conjugal feeling.”

“I do not, I admit it. My wife”

“Your wife! Do not use the word. I am your wife. As man and wife we were created from the beginning. Your unhappy companion, had she found her heart’s proper resting place, would have been a different woman. Marriage, my love, is an ordinance so holy that the Divine nature  alone can fully comprehend it. In the Divine the male and female, the positive and negative of spiritual force, are  truly united. With mortals this is seldom granted; with disembodied spirits it may be called into existence at will in a certain sense, but many who in the world have been  unhappily mated, do not will it—they fear, and their fear  prevents. But in the Divine it is a mighty force, the creative power calling into being the myriads of immortal souls with which the universe is filled.”

“As I said before, I hear, I comprehend dimly, I believe instinctively—but I shall forget.”

“Would you taste in some slight measure the ineffable bliss of a true conjugal union? That, my love, will be something which you can never forget.”

“Most gladly!”

Then in an instant I was alone!

Alone? No, not alone! I was complete!

No words can do my feelings justice. A strange sensation of duality had come over me. I felt that there were two of us, and yet that I and the woman were mysteriously one.

But I could not see her—nor did I wish to see her. She seemed to be inside of me—it was rapture unspeakable to  know that she was there.