The questions which filled this implacable young investigator's mind were these: Is my love worthy? And again: Dare I, insisting on man's unity with all other organisms and subject to the same laws of extinction, entertain the idea of marriage? If the theories I hold are true--if the soul of a child is no more than the animating principle of the ant or the ape (and this I cannot deny)--then of what avail is human life? By what right do men bring other organisms into being knowing that they will only flutter a little while in the sun like butterflies and die as unavailingly as moths?
Up to this time he had accepted with a certain calm pitilessness the most inexorable tenets of the evolutionists, and had defended them with remorseless zeal; but on this fair spring morning, with love for Viola stirring in his heart, he found himself far less disposed to crush and confound. He acknowledged a growing sympathy with those who mourn the tragic fact of death.
All that he had read concerning clairvoyance, telepathy, hypnotism, and their allied subjects began to assume new significance and a weightier importance. He was annoyed to find himself profoundly concerned as to whether the power of "suggestion" was anything like as coercive as many eminent men believed it to be, and in this awakened interest he 'phoned Tolman (upon reaching his desk), asking him to lunch with him at the club. "If there is anything in his philosophy I want to know it," he said, as he turned to his desk.
He found no word from Lambert, and this troubled him. "If he does not come to-day I must act alone," he concluded, and attempted to take up his work, but found his brain preoccupied, his hand heavy.
Weissmann came in late, looking old and worn. He, too, had passed a restless night. He nodded curtly to his assistant and set to work without reference to the sitting or the psychic; and yet Morton was very sure his chief's mind was as profoundly engaged as his own, and a little later in the forenoon he stopped at his desk and said: "Lunch, with me, doctor; I have asked Tolman, and I want to talk things over with you both."
Weissmann consented in blunt abstraction, and the work proceeded quite in the regular routine so far as he was concerned.