The idea interested her for a moment, but she was thinking of her project to find out if, like Owen, he thought that the virtue of chastity was non-essential in women, or if the other virtues were dependent upon it.  But how to lead the conversation back to this question she did not for the moment know.  At last she said—­“You ask me to love you—­but to be my lover you would have to surrender all your spiritual life, that which is most to you, that which makes your genius.  Do you think it worth it?”

He hesitated, then answered her with some vague reference to destiny, but she guessed the truth.  As free as Owen himself from ethical scruples, he still felt that we should overcome our sexual nature.  She asked herself why:  and she wondered just as Owen wondered when confronted by her religious conscience.  They looked at each other long and gravely, and he told her of the great seer who had collected in her own person all the cryptic revelation, all the esoteric lore of the East.  He admitted that she had allowed carnal intercourse to some of her disciples while forbidding it to others.

“Evidently judging chastity to be in some cases essential to the other virtues.”

She heard him say that a sect of mystics to which he belonged, or perhaps it was whose society he frequented, advised the married state but with this important reservation, that instead of corporal possession they should endeavour to aid each other to rise to a higher spiritual plane, anticipating in this life a little the perfect communion of spirit which awaited them in the next.  But such theories did not appeal to Evelyn.  She could only understand the renunciation of the married state for the sake of closer intimacy with the spiritual life; and she was more interested when he told her of the cruelties, the macerations and the abstinences which the Indian seers resorted to, so that the opacity of the fleshly envelope might be diminished and let the soul through.  In modern, as in the most ancient ages, with the scientist as with the seer, marvels and prodigies are reached through the subjugation of the flesh; as life dwindles like a flame that a breath will quench, the spirit attains its maximum, and the abiding and unchanging life that lies beyond death waxes till it becomes the real life.

“Is this life, then, not real?”

“If reality means what we understand, could anything be more unreal?”

“Then you do believe in a future state?”

“Yes, I certainly believe in a future state....  So much so that it seems impossible to believe that life ends utterly with death.”

But to Evelyn’s surprise, he seemed to doubt the immortality of this future state, and fell back on the Irish doctrine which holds that after death you pass to the great plain or land under the sea, or the land over the sea, or the land of the children of the goddess Dana.

“Even now my destiny is accomplishing.”