"Precisely," answered Gervase quickly and with some warmth; "but my spirit idealizes it,--my imagination sees beyond it,--my soul grasps it."
"Oh, you have a soul?" exclaimed Dr. Dean, beginning to laugh again. "Now, how did you find that out?"
Gervase looked at him in a sudden surprise.
"Every man has an inward self, naturally," he said. "We call it 'soul' as a figure of speech; it is really temperament merely."
"Oh, it is merely temperament? Then you don't think it is likely to outlive you, this soul--to take new phases upon itself and go on existing, an immortal being, when your body is in a far worse condition (because less carefully preserved) than an Egyptian mummy?"
"Certainly not!" and Gervase flung away the end of his finished cigarette. "The immortality of the soul is quite an exploded theory. It was always a ridiculous one. We have quite enough to vex us in our present life, and why men ever set about inventing another is more than I am able to understand. It was a most foolish and barbaric superstition."
The gay sound of music now floated towards them from the ball- room,--the strains of a graceful, joyous, half-commanding, half- pleading waltz came rhythmically beating on the air like the measured movement of wings,--and Denzil Murray, beginning to grow restless, walked to and fro, his eyes watching every figure that crossed and re-crossed the hall. But Dr. Dean's interest in Armand Gervase remained intense and unabated; and approaching him, he laid two lean fingers delicately on the white folds of the Bedouin dress just where the heart of the man was hidden.
"'A foolish and barbaric superstition!'" he echoed slowly and meditatively. "You do not believe in any possibility of there being a life--or several lives--after this present death through which we must all pass inevitably, sooner or later?"
"Not in the least! I leave such ideas to the ignorant and uneducated. I should be unworthy of the progressive teachings of my time if I believed such arrant nonsense."
"Death, you consider, finishes all? There is nothing further--no mysteries beyond? ..." and Dr. Dean's eyes glittered as he stretched forth one thin, slight hand and pointed into space with the word "beyond," an action which gave it a curious emphasis, and for a fleeting second left a weird impression on even the careless mind of Gervase. But he laughed it off lightly.
"Nothing beyond? Of course not! My dear sir, why ask such a question? Nothing can be plainer or more positive than the fact that death, as you say, finishes all."