She Buildeth Her House. Will Levington Comfort

unusual, had encountered this remarkable woman. Having very little to say as a rule, Madame Nestor was a figure for comment and one not readily forgotten because of occasional memorable utterances. In all the cults of New York, there was likely no individual quite so out of alignment with ordinary life. Indefinitely, she would be called fifty. Her forehead was broad, her mouth soft. The face as a whole was heavy and flour-white. There was a distention of eyeballs and a pulpy shapelessness to her body which gave the impression of advanced physical deterioration—that peculiar kind of breaking down, often noticeable among psychics of long practice. Her absolute incapacity to keep anything of value was only one characteristic of interest. Madame Nestor's record of apparently thoughtless generosity was truly inspiriting.

      "I had to see you to-day," she said, sinking down with a sigh of relief. "I sat behind you last night in Prismatic Hall."

      The younger woman recalled with a start—the whisper she had heard. She leaned forward and inquired quickly: "So it was you, Madame Nestor, who knew—this Bellingham"—she cleared her throat as she uttered the name—"as he is now—a quarter of a century ago?"

      "Yes. How very strange that you should have heard what I said. … You will join one of his classes, I presume?"

      "I can imagine doing no such thing."

      "Dear Paula, do you think it will really turn out—that you are to have no relation with Bellingham?"

      Paula repressed the instant impulse to answer sharply. The fact that she had already felt Bellingham's power made the other's words a harsh irritation.

      "What relation could I have? He is odious to me."

      "I suppose I should have been a cinder long since, dear, if these were days for burning witches," Madame Nestor said. "When I saw Bellingham's eyes settle upon you last night—it appeared to me that you are to know him well. I came here to give you what strength I could—because he is the chief of devils."

      "I'm only one of the working neuters of the human hive," Paula managed to declare.

      The elder woman said a strange thing: "Ah, no. The everlasting feminine is alive in your every movement. A man like Bellingham would cross the world for you. Some strong-souled woman sooner or later must encompass his undoing, and last night it came to me in a way to force my conviction—that you are the woman."

      Paula bent toward her. Darkness covered the centres of her mind and she was afraid. She could not laugh, for she had already met the magician's will. "But I loathe him," she whispered. "About the very name when I first heard it yesterday was an atmosphere which aroused all my antagonism."

      "Even that—he has overcome, but it may help you to endure."

      "What does the man want?"

      "He wants life—life—floods of young, fine vitality to renew his own flesh. He wants to live on and on in the body which you have seen. It is all he has, for his soul is dead—or feeble as a frog's. He fears death, because he cannot come back. He renews his life from splendid sources of human magnetism—such as you possess. It is Bellingham's hell to know that, once out of the flesh, he has not soul enough, if any, to command a human body again. You see in him an empty thing, which has lived, God knows how many years, hugging the warmth of his blood—a creature who knows that to die means the swift disintegration of an evil principle."

      "Do you realize, Madame Nestor," Paula asked excitedly, "that you are talking familiarly of things which may exist in books of ancient wisdom, but that this is New York—New York packed about us? New York does not reckon with such things."

      "The massed soul of this big city does not reckon with such things, Paula. That is true, but we are apart. Bellingham is apart. He is wiser than the massed soul of New York."

      "One might believe, even have such a religious conviction, but you speak of an actual person, the terrible inner mystery of a man, whom we have seen—a man who frightened me hideously last night—and to-day! You bring the thing home to a room in a New York apartment … Can't you see how hard to adjust, this is? I don't mean to stop or distract you, but this has become—you are helping to keep it so—such an intimate, dreadful thing!"

      Madame Nestor had been too long immersed in occultism to grasp the world's judgment of her sayings. "Listen, Paula, this that I tell you is inherent in every thinking man. You are bewildered by the personal nature it has assumed. … To every one of us shall come the terrible moment of choice. Man is not conceived blindly to be driven. Imagine a man who is become a rapidly evolving mind. On the one side is the animal-nature, curbed and obedient; on the other, his gathering soul-force. The mind balances between these two—soul and body. The time has come for him to choose between a lonely path to the Heights, or the broad diverging highway, moving with pomp, dazzling with the glare of vain power, and brooded over by an arrogant materialism which slays the soul. … The spirit of man says, 'Take the rising road alone.' The old world-mother sings to him from the swaying throng, 'Come over and be my king. Look at my arts, my palaces, my valiant young men and my glorious women. I will put worship in the hearts of the strong—for you! I will put love in the hearts of the beautiful—for you! Come over and be my king! Later, when you are old and have drunk deep of power—you may take the rising road alone.'"

      Paula invariably qualified a dogmatic statement as a possibility in her own mind; but something of this—man reaching a moment of choice—had always appealed to her as a fundamental verity. Man must conquer not only his body, but his brain, with its subtle dreams of power, a more formidable conflict, before the soul assumes supremacy in the mind, and man's progress to the Uplands becomes a conscious and glorious ascent.

      "You put it with wonderful clearness, Madame Nestor," she said.

      "I am an old woman who has thought of these things until they are clear. This is the real battle of man, beside which victory over mere appetites of the body is but a boyish triumph. The intellect hungers for power and possession; to hold the many inferior intellects in its own despotic destiny. Against this glittering substance of attraction is the still intangible faith of the soul—an awful moment of suspense. God or Mammon—choose ye! … Listen, Paula, to New York below—treading the empty mill of commerce——"

      "New York has not chosen yet?"

      "No, dear, but hundreds, thousands, are learning in preparation for that moment of choice—the falseness and futility of material possessions."

      "That is a good thought—an incorruptible kind of optimism!" Paula exclaimed. … "You think this Bellingham has made the evil choice?"

      "Yes. Long ago."

      "Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have conquered the flesh."

      "Yes."

      "But you depict him—I find him—Desire Incarnate!"

      "Exactly, Paula, because he has reverted. The animal controls his mind, not the soul. Bellingham is retracing his way back to chaos, with a human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the ages, he has drawn his forces, which to us are mystery. He uses these secret forces of Nature to prolong his own life—which is all he has. The mystic cord is severed within him. He is a body, nothing but a body—hence the passion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has learned—who knows how long ago?—to replenish his own vitality with that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know too well. He is kin with those creatures of legend, the loup-garou, the vampire. I tell you he is an insatiable sponge for human magnetism."

      "Past all doubt, can't Bellingham turn back?" Paula asked tensely. "With all his worldly knowledge, and knowing his own doom, can he not turn back—far back, a lowly-organized soul, but on the human way?" Hopelessness, anywhere, was a blasting conception to her.

      "No. I tell you he is a living coffin. There is nothing in him to energize a pure motive. He might give a fortune to the poor, but it would be for his own gain. He could not suffer for the poor, or love them. Dead within, he is detached from the great centres of virtue and purity—from all that carries the race forward, and will save us