To this nearly overwhelming rush of contending forces, Robert at times submitted quite unresentingly. He knew appearances were certainly against him. He also knew that there was never a crisis at which liberty of individual action was to be more demanded by men and women than at this crisis at the end of the nineteenth century. Only those can understand Robert’s troubles who are touched with a feeling of that infirmity under which a brain staggers when the inflow of psychical life is to the full, as much as even the rapidly expanding braincell can carry. For he was still trying to keep his place in the outer world, while passing through such stress of mental weather as is better borne in seclusion, if such seclusion can anywhere be found in these too public times. For only those can carry this inflow of mental afflatus who have been taught to know that this pressure on the brain-cells will but happily result in an increase of the brain’s capacity to commodiously entertain the life that comes into these cells, if but this inflow of mental afflatus can be met with heroic faith and fortitude, _well instructed_. Daniel was his helper, and had told him that persons who were rightly taught these scientifically-religious facts do not fear, but on the reverse, _exult_ in this brain-cracking-pressure; being upheld by their faith that the pressure, endured as a good soldier of the cross should endure it, will but result in the upbuilding of more brain-cells, which will then serve gloriously as enlarged receptacles for the incoming of more brain substance; with the further result that as this development goes forward these good workers will construct a brain-building fitted to carry on an order of cerebration, finer and inconceivably swifter and more reliable than that which is now dreamed of by man as possible. But well assisted though he was by the dear old Daniel (who had walked that way before him), Robert was at a crisis when he was getting all the inflow of spiritual afflatus that he could carry. And he decided if Elkhorn were to be at the little evening “conversations,” dear to the Dakshas, this judge should not be allowed to badger him into discussing psychical matters, about which the judge was as uneasily curious as he was unenlightenable. For Daniel knew that such “growing pains” as afflict men whose mentalities are being adapted to the psychic burden they have to bear, are, to men devoid of these higher inspirational benefits, the unknown quantity in the problem of life. And he considered these experiences used to be called “strivings after God” and “visitations of grace” by Christians of the true spiritual type of the older time. And he believed that in turning his back on all forms of religion, Elkhorn had turned his face away from the very facts of spiritual development which he was yet curious to dissect now, as a new psychical scientific development.