d I found that every
morning after a Spiritualist _seance_ I had a queer feeling of lowness
and degradation, of having been soiled; much like the feeling, I
suppose, that people have the morning after they have been drunk. But I
happen to have what people call a strong head; and I have never been
really drunk.

PATRICIA. I am glad of that.

CONJURER. It hasn't been for want of trying. But it wasn't long before
the spirits with whom I had been playing at table-turning, did what I
think they generally do at the end of all such table-turning.

PATRICIA. What did they do?

CONJURER. They turned the tables. They turned the tables upon me. I
don't wonder at your believing in fairies. As long as these things were
my servants they seemed to me like fairies. When they tried to be my
masters.... I found they were not fairies. I found the spirits with whom
I at least had come in contact were evil ... awfully, unnaturally evil.

PATRICIA. Did they say so?

CONJURER. Don't talk of what they said. I was a loose fellow, but I had
not fallen so low as such things. I resisted them; and after a pretty
bad time, psychologically speaking, I cut the connexion. But they were
always tempting me to use the supernatural power I had got from them.
It was not very great, but it was enough to move things about, to alter
lights, and so on. I don't know whether you realize that it's rather a
strain on a man to drink bad coffee at a coffee-stall when he knows he
has just enough magic in him to make a bottle of champagne walk out of
an empty shop.

PATRICIA. I think you behaved very well.

CONJURER. [_Bitterly._] And when I fell at last it was for nothing half
so clean and Christian as champagne. In black blind pride and anger and
all kinds of heathenry, because of the impudence of a schoolboy, I
called on the fiends and they obeyed.

PATRICIA. [_Touches his arm._] Poor fellow!

CONJURER. Your goodness is the only goodness that never goes wrong.

PATRICIA. And what _are_ we to do with Morris? I--I believe you now, my
dear. But he--he will never believe.

CONJURER. There is no bigot like the atheist. I must think.

[_Walks towards the garden windows. The other men reappear to
arrest his movement._

DOCTOR. Where are you going?

CONJURER. I am going to ask the God whose enemies I have served if I am
still worthy to save a child.

[_Exit into garden. He paces up and down exactly as_ MORRIS _has
done. As he does so