“She is engaged to a man across the hall, Rodney Carter.  She has the room next to mine.  His voice is deep and carrying, hers is clear and ringing, and the walls are thin.  So I have benefited by most of their courtship.  But the course of true love, you know.  She has tried spiritually and harmoniously to convert him to immaterialism, but Rodney is very conscious of his physical, muscular, material being, and he hoots at her derisively, but tenderly.

“‘Oh, cut it out, Emily,’ he said, one evening.  ’We can only afford one spirit in the family.  One of us has got to earn a living.  Spirits, it seems, require plenty of steak and potatoes to keep them in harmony.  I could not conscientiously lead you to the altar, even a spheral altar, if I were not prepared to pay house rent and coal bills.  One’s enough, you can be our luxury.’

“’But, Rod, if you are in harmony you can earn our living so much more easily.  You must get above this notion of material necessities.  There are no such things.’

“‘I don’t believe it,’ he interrupted coldly.  ’There are material necessities.  You are one of them.  The most necessary in the world.  You may be harmonious, but you are material, too.  That is why I love you.  I couldn’t be crazy about a melodious breath of air ghosting around the back yard.  And I am not strong for disembodied minds, either.  They make me nervous.  They sound like skulls and cross-bones, and whitening skeletons to me.  I love you, your arms, your face, all of you.  It may not be proper to talk about it, but I love it.  Can you imagine our minds embracing each other, thrilling at the contact,—­oh, it’s tommyrot.  A fool—­’

“‘It may be tommyrot to you, Rod,’ said Emily haughtily.  ’But the inspiration of the matchless minds of the mystic men of the Orient—­’

“’Inspiration of idiocy.  What do mystic men of the Orient know about warm-blooded Americans, dead in love?  I might kiss the air until I was blue in the face,—­nothing to it,—­but let me kiss you, and we are both aquiver, and—­’

“‘Rodney Carter, don’t you dare say such things,’ she cried furiously.  ’It is insulting.  Besides it has nothing to do with it.  It isn’t so anyhow.  And what is more—­’

“’There’s nothing mysterious about us.  Let the old Chinesers pad around in their bare feet and naked souls if they want to.  We are children of light, we are, creatures of earth, earthly.  We’re—­’

“‘Oh, I can’t argue with you, Rod,’ she began confusedly.

“’I don’t want you to.  Kiss me.  One kiss, Emily mine, will confound the whole united order of Maudlin Mystics.  I am willing to risk all the anathemas contained in an inharmonious sphere for one touch of your lips.  Go ahead with your sacred doctrine of universal and spiritual imbecility, but soften its harshness with worldly, physical, sin-suggesting kisses, and I am in tune with the infinite.’