"I never was so absurd!"
"Then there may be a whole night-world that you know nothing about.
You cannot tell that the place is not then thronged with ghosts:
you have never given them a chance of appearing to you. I don't say
it is so, for I know nothing, or at least little, about such things.
I have had no experience of the sort any more than you--and I have
been out whole nights on the mountains when I was a shepherd."
"Why then should you trouble your fancy about them?"
"Perhaps just for that reason."
"I do not understand you."
"I mean, because I can come into no communication with such a world
as may be about me, I therefore imagine it. If, as often as I
walked abroad at night, I met and held converse with the
disembodied, I should use my imagination little, but make many notes
of facts. When what may be makes no show, what more natural than to
imagine about it? What is the imagination here for?"
"I do not know. The less one has to do with it the better."
"Then the thing, whatever it be, should not be called a faculty, but
a weakness!"
"Yes."
"But the history of the world shows it could never have made
progress without suggestions upon which to ground experiments:
whence may these suggestions come if not from the weakness or
impediment called the imagination?"
Again there was silence. Miss Graeme began to doubt whether it was
possible to hold rational converse with a man who, the moment they
began upon anything, went straight aloft into some high-flying
region of which she knew and for which she cared nothing.
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