“I say, have you a religion?”

“Not I. How can I when I don’t go to no church?”

“That is, no doubt, a convincing proof of heathendom.  And yet I have a religion that never leads me to a church door.  My religion is will, my gospel is the gospel of influence, and my god is power.  Will binds the world into a net, whose strands are like iron.  Will dies if it is weak, but if it is strong enough it becomes practically immortal.  But, though it lives itself, it has the power to kill others.  It can murder a soul in a man or a woman, and throw it into the grave to decay and go to dust, and in the man it can create a soul diametrically opposite to the corpse, and the world will say the man is the same; but he is not the same.  He is another man.  Or if the will is not strong enough actually to kill a soul”—­at this point Valentine spoke more slowly, and there was a certain note of uneasiness, even almost of agitation, in his voice—­“it can yet expel it from the body in which it resides, and drive it, like a new Ishmael, into the desert, where it must hover, useless, hopeless, degraded, and naked, because it has no body to work in.  Yes! yes! that must be so!  The soul can have no power divorced from the body! none! none!”

He got up from his chair, and began to pace the little room.  Cuckoo watched him as a child might watch a wild animal in its cage.  His face was hard and thin with deep thought, and hers was contorted under her yellow hair—­contorted in a frantic effort to grasp and to understand what he was saying; for, stupid, ignorant as the lady of the feathers was, she had a sharp demon in her that often told her the truth, and this demon whispered now in her ear: 

“Listen, and you may learn things that you long to know!”

And she listened motionless, her eyes bright and eager, her lips shut together, her slim body a-quiver with intensity, mental and physical.

“How can it?” Valentine went on.  “What is a soul without a body?  You cannot see it.  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.”