things. I
probe, and wonder, and cannot let it alone, like most people, and be
content with surfaces. Of late years, and especially since I took up
theosophy, I have found great joy and comfort from my association with
the S.P.R. I am in touch with several very wonderful thought-readers,
crystal-gazers, mediums, and planchette writers, who have often strangely
illumined the dark places of life for me. To those who mock and doubt, I
merely say, '_try_.' Or else I cite, not '_Raymond_' nor Conan Doyle, but
that strange, interesting, scientific book by a Belfast professor, who
made experiments in weighing the tables before and after they levitated,
and weighing the mediums, and finding them all lighter. I think that was
it; anyhow it is all, to any open mind, entirely convincing that
_something_ had occurred out of the normal, which is what Percy and the
twins never will believe. When I say 'try' to Percy, he only answers,
'I should fail, my dear. I may, as I have been called, be a superman,
but I am not a superwoman, and cannot call up spirits.' And the
children are hopeless about it, too. Frank says we are not intended to
'lift the curtain' (that is what he calls it). He is such a thorough
clergyman, and never had my imagination; he calls my explorations
'dabbling in the occult.' His wife jeers, and asks me if I've been
talking to many spooks lately. But then her family are hard-headed
business people, quite different from me. Clare says the whole thing
frightens her to death. For her part she is content with what the
Church allows of spiritual exploration, which is not much. Clare, since
what I am afraid I must call her trouble, has been getting much Higher
Church; incense and ritual seem to comfort her. I know the phase; I
went through it twenty years ago, when my baby Michael died and the
world seemed at an end. But I came out the other side; it couldn't last
for me, I had to have much more. Clare may remain content with it; she
has not got my perhaps too intense instinct for groping always after
further light. And I am thankful that she should find comfort and help
anywhere. Only I rather hope she will never join the Roman Church; its
banks are too narrow to hold the brimming river of the human
spirit--even my Clare's, which does not, perhaps, brim very high, dear,
simple child that she is.

As for the twins, they are merely cynical about all experiments with the
supernatural. I often feel that if my little Michael h