Sarah Mawle ... Sarah Mawle ..." ran through the
room like water. And, in Skale's mouth, it sounded as his own name
had sounded--different. It became in some significant way--thus
Spinrobin expresses it always--stately, important, nay, even august.
It became real. The syllables led his ear away from their normal
signification--away from the outer toward the inner. His ordinary mental
picture of the mere letters SARAHMAWLE disappeared and became merged in
something else--into something alive that pulsed and moved with
vibrations of its own. For, with the outer sound there grew up another
interior one, that finally became separate and distinct.

Now Spinrobin was well aware that the continued repetition of one's own
name can induce self-hypnotism; and he also knew that the reiteration of
the name of an object ends by making that object disappear from the mind.
"Mustard," repeated indefinitely, comes to have no meaning at all. The
mind drops behind the mere symbol of the sound into something that is
unintelligible, if not meaningless. But here it was altogether another
matter, and from the torrent of words and similes he uses to describe it,
this--a curious mixture of vividness and confusion--is apparently what he
witnessed:

For, as the clergyman's resonant voice continued quietly to utter the
name, something passed gradually into the appearance of the motherly old
housekeeper that certainly was not there before, not visible, at least,
to the secretary's eyes. Behind the fleshly covering of the body, within
the very skin and bones it seemed, there flowed with steady splendor an
effect of charging new vitality that had an air of radiating from her
face and figure with the glow and rush of increased life. A suggestion of
grandeur, genuine and convincing, began to express itself through the
humble domestic exterior of her everyday self; at first, as though some
greater personage towered shadowy behind her, but presently with a
growing definiteness that showed it to be herself and nothing separate.
The two, if two they were, merged.

Her mien, he saw, first softened astonishingly, then grew firm with an
aspect of dignity that was unbelievably beautiful. An air of peace and
joy her face had always possessed, but this was something beyond either.
It was something imposing, majestic. So perilously adjusted is the
ludicrous to the sublime, that while the secretary wondered dumbly
whether the word "housekeeper" might also in Sk