Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/8

8 place. I knew then that four and ninepence or not, the book was going home with me.

"Have you read any Eastern books?" she said, "I've been reading a lot lately."

"Eastern?" I said, puzzled.

"Yes, the philosophy of the East. It would interest you I am sure—I believe you are very psychic."

She lowered her voice to a sort of dramatic mystery, half-bantering as if speaking to a child. She was always conscious of everything she did and she was trying to impress me, I knew.

"How do you mean psychic?" I asked.

"Don't you know what psychic means? You come with me to a lecture at my "School of New Thought" on Sunday and see what it means. Will you come?"

"Yes, thank you very much," I said, feeling more interested in the book under my arm than in the "School of New Thought." But she looked pretty under her blue hat, with a dancing mischief in her eyes and her half-cynical sideways smile.

"Are you going to take that book?"

"Yes," I said. "Listen to this, and I read the lines beginning:—

"'We all feel that at best much of our real selves remains in life-long defect of expression, and that there are great deeps of the under-self, which, though organically related to our ordinary consciousness, are still, for the most part, hidden and unexplored. All, in fact, points to the existence within us of a very profound self, which, so far, we may justifiably conclude to be much greater than any one known manifestation of it, which requires, for its expression, the forms of a lifetime, and still stretches on and beyond; which perhaps belong to another sphere of being—as the ship in the air and the sunlight, belongs to another sphere than the hull, buried deep in the water. It seems indeed probable that the human soul, at death, does at first pass, with its cloud-vesture of memories and qualities, into some intermediate region, and for a long period, does remain there quiescent, surveying its past, recovering from the shocks and outrages of mortal experience, knitting up and smoothing out the broken and tangled threads, trying hard to understand the pattern. It seems probable that there is a long period of digestion and reconcilement and slow brooding over the new life which has to be formed.

"'When one thinks of the strange contradictions of our mortal life, the hopeless antagonistic elements, the warring of passions, the shattering of ideals, the stupor of monotony, the soul like a bird shut in a cage, or with bright wings dragged in the mire; the horrible sense of sin which torments