When a woman's imagination, still young and ardent, begins to find the things of earth as Hamlet found them, "weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable," it is only natural that she should turn with a longing mind to the life that earth cannot give, the something unseen and mysterious that certain gifted individuals have attributed to themselves the power of seeing. Vera, after six years of marriage, six years of unlimited wealth and unconscious self-indulgence, had begun to discover that most things were stale, and some things weary, and all things unprofitable; and then, to a mind steeped in modern poetry and modern romance, and the modern music that always means something more than mere combinations of harmonious sounds, there had come a yearning for the higher life, the transcendental life that only the elect can realise, and only the earth-weary can ardently desire. Francis Symeon was the philosopher to whom she turned with unquestioning faith; for even those who had spoken lightly of his creed and of his reasoning faculty had admitted that the man was essentially sincere, and that the faith he offered his followers was for him as impregnable as the rock of Holy Scripture. He was announced on the following day as the clock in Vera's morning-room struck three, a punctuality so exceptional as to seem almost uncanny, when compared with the vague sense of time in the rest of her acquaintance. She received him in a room where there was no fear of interruption--her sanctuary, more library than boudoir, where the books she loved, her poets and novelists and philosophers, in the bindings she had herself invented, filled her book-cases, alternating with black-and-white portraits of the gods of her idolatry--Browning, Tennyson, Byron, Scott, de Musset, Heine, Henry Irving, Gounod. Only the dead had place there--the dead musician, the dead poet, the dead actor. It was death that made them beloved and longed for. They had gone from her reach for ever; and it was this sense of something for ever lost that made them adorable. Mr. Symeon looked round the walls with evident admiration. "I see you prefer the faces of the noble dead to water-colour sketches and majolica plates," he said. "Divine books, divine faces, those are the best companions a woman can have." "I spend a good deal of my life in this room," Vera answered. "I have no children. I suppose if I had I should spend most of my time with them. I should not have to choose my companions among the dead."