“I want to know,” he said, “all about—­myself.”

She laughed lightly as she seated herself in an old-fashioned straight-back chair.

“If I should tell you that,” she said, “I would give you the sum and substance of human wisdom.  That seems to me the greatest mystery of the unknowable.  No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human being, I suppose,—­and yet no human being knows himself.  If you search yourself, you find mystery.  If you ask others, you find double mystery.  Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine.”

“That is true,” responded Norcross.  “That is true.  But your spirits—­”

“Not mine,” she interrupted.  “And perhaps not spirits, either.  Though they speak to me, I cannot say that they are real, any more than I can tell that this table, these clothes”—­her long, expressive, ringless hand swept across the area of her skirt—­“than you yourself, are real.  All reality and unreality may dwell in the mind.  Though personally,” she added, “I prefer to believe that this chair, these clothes, you, I, are real.  And if they are real, so are the Voices.  At least, so I believe.”

This philosophy was past any power of Norcross for repartee; the faculties which deal with such things had wasted in him during thirty years in Wall Street.  But the effect of her voice, her ladyhood, and her command of this philosophy—­those moved him.

“Will your voices tell me anything?” he asked, irrelevantly, yet coming straight to the point.

“Impatience,” she answered, “will not help you.  The power bloweth where it listeth.  That impatience is one of the roads to trickery employed by the frauds of—­my profession.”

A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.

“You admit that there are frauds in your profession, then?”

“Oh, dear, yes!” she smiled back at him.  “It lends itself so easily to fraud that the temptation among the little people must be overwhelming—­the more because trickery is often more accurate than real revelation.  I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split.  But I console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must be on the verge of it sometimes.  Let me draw you a parallel.  Perhaps you know something of the old alchemists.  They had laid hold on the edge of chemistry.  But because that truth came confused, because they all had things by the wrong handle, a thousand of them confused truth with error until, in the end, they did not know right from wrong.  This force in which you and I are interested is a little like chemistry—­it may be called mental and spiritual chemistry.  But because it deals with the unseen, not with the seen, it is a thousand times more uncertain and baffling.  We have ears, eyes, touch—­a great equipment—­to perceive gold, silver, stones, trees, water.  But we have only this mind, a mystery even to ourselves, to perceive an idea, a concept.  I wish that I could express it better”—­she broke off suddenly—­“and very likely I’m boring you—­but when your whole soul is full of a thing it will overflow.”  She smiled upon Norcross, as though for sympathy.  If he gave it, his face did not betray him.