"And hear me further, Lonnie boy. It was just my reading of your own High Joss, and it was out of his profound profundity that I dug your condemnation. And it is he, and not Bill Vanderhook, who has settled your eternal--hash.
"Now you hear me a minute. I'm going to do a little quoting myself. I spent days and nights wading through that illuminated slush to see if I could find any excuse for you. But instead of that I picked out the biggest spike in the lid.
"But, Gee, wasn't it a job? My nerve nearly brought on paresis. I did have congestive chill, ticdouloureux, meningitis, lock-jaw and curvature of the spine. But I read it just the same, and here's what your old misfit says. Listen, and when you strike that eternal oblivion take a day off and go back through your disintegrated, dissolved and scattered gray matter and see if _you_ can remember anything like _this_,--
"'Mechanism does not escape this trope and rhapsody, being indeed their most conspicuous illustration, since its fundamental principle is that of leverage, whereby there is libration or oscillation, as of a scale or a pendulum, or circular motion as of a wheel. In celestial mechanism the material fulcrum disappears, and there is the invisible centre of motion, of light and return, through tendencies which seem to balance each other, giving the motion the orbital form.'"
"And here's your old Manhattan Mummy come home to roost."
"Henrymillsalden, second chapter and fifth verse."
Alonzo Leffingwell bowed his head. He pressed his hand to his solar plexus and then faintly did he murmur--"Then there is nothing that will melt or soften you--nothing?"
"Oh, ring off. D'ye take me for the ice man? Well, I'm not. I'm pig-iron, pipe-clay and steel filings; and what's worse, the more I _remember_ the madder I _get_."
"And then--and then--there is nothing that I can do--or can say?--"
"Once--and--for--all,--NOPE, my gay Gnani of Gingalee, for the last time, you're up against it."
And there was silence in the cellar for the space of about eight minutes.
And then,--"It is not, O William, simply for myself I plead. I am thinking also of you, and of the Karmic consequences of this Act. Had you,--had you--been illuminated--"
"I'd a hoisted you out of my house a year ago,"--interrupted Bill fiercely. "But I wasn't illuminated. My aura wasn't anything but fuzz. Wasn't lit up. I was in the gloaming. But I'm not there now. I'm out of the woods. And I've got a pink halo of forty-four horse power. D'ye hear me?" and the materialist grinned away his scowl. Waving his hand outward in the glaring atmosphere, he continued,--"I'm getting there. If this ain't illumination I don't know light when I see it. Oh, yes, I'm a small incandescent myself. But see here"--and Bill suddenly closed the conversation and his jaws with a snap.
