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 essence of spiritual corruption. But that does not compel me to deny any place at all to the male sex; it does not prove to me that the leaning of a mother toward her son as a son, of a wife towards her husband as a husband, are illusions belonging to the terrestrial conditions, and doomed to pass away along with those conditions. Rather it seems to me that just as the common religious instinct of the world is a guarantee for a future life, so the equally general attraction of women toward their male kith and kin is a guarantee for the permanence of the bi-sexual relation in that future life. If you may despise the guarantee in the one case, why not also in the other? Anyhow, Lesbie, I must hear a good deal further, before I can digest the notion that the male half of society is an optical illusion! For in sober truth, your doctrine almost comes to that.’

‘Decidedly, dear Lettie, I should like to know your friend Dr Mispath; it would be one of the many inducements to my crossing the ocean to see you, if ever that can be compassed. Meanwhile, I see the drift of what he says, and if it be true, if the writers of the Hebrew mystical books were controlled by spirits, not lying ones, superior to their own intelligence, the passage you refer to about the fiery dragon out of the serpent’s root conveys at once a promise of Eden to those who are with our cause, and a warning of another place or state to those who are against it.

‘But to come down from ethereal speculations of that kind to the more homely part of our subject, I quite admit the force of what you say in praise of faithful affection for old companions, be they human beings or lower animals,