You cannot hear it, and if you think you can, that is
a vile trick of the mind, an hallucination. For if one man can see it,
why not another? Here, let me look into your eyes again."
As he said the last words, he stopped opposite to Cuckoo, suddenly caught
her chin in his two hands, which felt hard and cold, and forcibly pushed
up her face towards his. She was terrified, beginning now to think him
mad, and to fear personal injury. Gazing hard and furtively into her
eyes, he said:
"No; it's a lie! It is not there. It never was! It is dead and finished
with, and I won't fear it."
As if struck by the fatigue of some sudden reaction, he sank down again
into his chair, and went on with his apparently fantastic monologue:
"And if it was ever alive, what could it do? A soul can't work, except
through a body; it must fasten on a body, and bend the body to its
will--man is such a creature that he can only be influenced through flesh
and blood, nerves, sinews, eyes, things he can see, things that he can
hear. He is so grovelling that nothing more delicate than these really
appeals to him."
Again, and this time with less abstraction, and with a sort of
contemptuous humour, he turned to the lady of the feathers, and
continued, as if once more aware of her presence:
"Are you imbibing my gospel, the gospel of will and of influence? I see
you are by your pretty attitude and by the engaging face you are making
at me.
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