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"Mrs. Lambert is a dear old ninny. Viola is a mighty bright girl suffering from a well-developed case of hysteria and auto-hypnosis." "What do you mean?" asked Serviss, sharply. Britt checked himself. "I ought not to speak of it, I suppose, but, as you are a stranger and can keep a professional secret, I will explain.
"Who are you?" he asked, moved, in spite of himself, by a liking for this new personality, so distinct from the others. "I am R.M. Waldron Viola's father." He seemed to wait for questions, and Serviss asked: "How do you feel about your daughter's mediumship? Are you not uneasy when you think of what you are demanding of her?"
Serviss became each moment more keenly aware of being face to face with a task which required all his tact, his self-possession, and his wit, for the man before him was immured in self-conceit, accustomed to carrying his point by a rush of words, and was, withal, a student possessed of unusual intellectual resource. He made a very handsome figure as he took his seat amid his books.
"You'd better take Britt's trail and return to the mountains," he said, kindly. "This is a bad climate for you." "My work is here," he replied, curtly. "I have no fear," and so they parted. Weissmann was sitting in silent meditation in one corner of the dining-room when Serviss returned. "Well, master, what do you think of to-night's performance?"
"We will let it go so. The world of sense and the world of spirit curiously intermingle as we know." "But these manifestations, so far as I have any knowledge, are so foolish and childish " "Well, so many foolish and childish persons have gone to the other world. Death is not the beginning of wisdom. I am an old man, Serviss, and already many of my loved ones are dead.
I want to be free of it all!" The intensity of her utterance amazed Serviss, and he studied her profile in silence before he answered. "I think I know what you mean, and I sympathize with you. You're too young to be troubled by the doubts and dismays of men like Clarke. He is preposterous in the face of a landscape like this.
Serviss pictures the gathering together of the most famous scientists of the day Edison, Roentgen, Lord Kelvin and others. The Martian machines and weapons left behind are dismantled; their principles of operation are discovered and duplicated; and a defense against their forces is perfected.
The line of her mouth lost something of its sweetness, and Serviss, seeing this, took another tack. "Granted these voices are genuine, they may be mistaken rash with zeal. You wouldn't say that they have gained infallibility a knowledge of both past and future merely by passing to the shadow world?" To this Clarke made answer: "That is precisely what we do believe.
"But this is not the only danger," Serviss hurried on to say. "This man Pratt is a rankly selfish old man, who is surrounded by flatterers and those who live off his desire to commune with his dead wife and daughters.
It should be studied by one like yourself to whom death is no near presence; as for me, I have two sons and one wife dead; my judgment would be vitiated therewith. You have no dead; you would make an admirable student of these spirit-voices and signs." Serviss, though a little awed by the old man's unexpectedly solemn manner, ventured further.
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