Clarke folded his arms in defiant mood. "I am."
"And this charming girl is your victim--the one for whom you make such claims, eh?"
Clarke regarded the old man with imperious lift of the head. "She is, without question, the most marvellous psychic in the world."
"'Psychic!'" Weissmann barked this word at him like an angry mastiff. "'Psychic!' What business has she to be a 'psychic'? She is too lovely to be anything but a wife and mother--a happy hausfrau. And you would make her infamous? My friend, I do not understand you."
Clarke's eyes blazed. "If I had the power I would lay her message before every living soul on the globe. Infamy? Sir, I know no higher honor than that of being cup-bearer to despairing souls thirsting for the water of life." Then a direct answer to the old man's prolonged stare: "You need have no fear. I will not go one jot beyond the advice of her 'guides.'"
"Her 'guides'? Who are they?"
"I mean her invisible ministers, compared with whose wisdom our learning is child's prattle for they are one with the sages of history. Their minds drink of the limitless ocean of all past knowledge and catch the gleam of discovery to come. Furthermore"--here his voice grew hard and his glance shifted to Serviss--"no one living has a more vital interest in her welfare than I. Surely I may be trusted to guard and cherish one who is soon to be my wife."
This blow, delivered with the orator's telling arrangement of phrase, fell with tremendous force upon Serviss, towards whom it was vengefully directed. With a heart filled with anger and disgust and pain the young host responded: "I am glad to have this assurance from you, for your action has seemed to me calculated to do Miss Lambert irreparable injury. Of course, I do not doubt your good intentions as regards her--I cannot do that after your final statement--but I think you underestimate your opposing force."
"We expect battle, but nothing can really harm us. What do we care for the puerile dispraise of the press? We are doing God's work in the world, and as for the scientists, they are as moles in the dark."
Weissmann's voice became reflective. "Do the parents of the girl not object?"
"Quite the contrary. Her mother trained her for this great work."
"That is very strange--this mother seems nice and sensible."
Clarke sneered. "You physicists think nothing is natural or sensible but your own grubbing. You nose in the mire studying parasites of decaying flesh, while we are lifting wing into the world of spirit where neither pain nor death is known. You are blinded by your bigotry, or you would see the leading of every new discovery in the modes of motion. Heat, light, the X-ray, the emanation of radium--do they not all point to new subtleties of the physical universe? The power which the spirits use to communicate with us, the world which they inhabit, is only a higher evolution, a more potent condition--"