come aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly
distinct qualities and desires and views of its own, not learnt from
you, and which you could not affect or change. All those qualities are
in it from the time of birth--but it takes a soul some time to learn
the use of the body. But the connection between the soul and the father
and mother who give it a body is a real one; I don't profess to know
what it is, or why it is that some parents have congenial children and
some quite uncongenial ones--that is only one of the many mysteries
which beset us. Holding all this, it does not seem to me on the face of
it impossible that the soul of the child should have been brought into
contact with Maud's soul; though of course the whole affair is quite
capable of a scientific and material explanation. But I have seen too
many strange things in my life to make me accept the scientific
explanation as conclusive. I have known men and women who, after a
bereavement, have had an intense consciousness of the presence of the
beloved spirit with them and near them. I have experienced it myself;
and it seems to me as impossible to explain as a sense of beauty. If
one feels a particular thing to be beautiful, one can't give good
reasons for one's emotion to a person who does not think the same thing
beautiful; but it appears to me that the duty of explaining it away
lies on the one who does NOT feel it. One can't say that beauty is a
purely subjective thing, because when two people think a thing
beautiful, they understand each other perfectly. Do I make myself clear
at all, or is that merely a bit of feminine logic?"

"No, indeed," said Howard slowly, "I think it is a good case. The very
last thing I would do is to claim to be fully equipped for the
understanding of all mysteries. My difficulty is that while there are
two explanations of a thing--a transcendental one and a material one--I
hanker after the material one. But it isn't because I want to
disbelieve the transcendental one. It is because I want to believe it
so much, that I feel that I must exclude all possibility of its being
anything else."

"Yes," said Mrs. Graves, "and I think you are perfectly right; one must
follow one's conscience in this. I don't want you to swallow it whole
at all. I want you, and I am sure that Maud wants you, just to wait and
see. Don't begin by denying the possibility of its being a
transcendental thing. Just hold the facts in your mind