While setting this down as quackery, the young Englishman was interested and stirred by the Oriental’s measured utterances. “Yet you say your own planet, horoscope, whatever you call it, gave you an influence over her?” he asked in a careless tone. “In this way,” the merchant went on: “I can make her sleep, and in her sleep I can bring before her eyes what vision I will; I can learn things concerning her which she herself in her waking hours does not know.” “Why, that is a sort of mesmerism; they do that over here without any aid from the planets.” “So you think. So perhaps the sea thinks that her tides advance and recede independently of the moon. And so, in Europe, Nature’s occult marvels are sneered at, and great forces wasted, which we Asiatics turn to account in moulding the courses of our lives.” “Will you explain?” “In England a person gifted with this force which his neighbours ignore and he himself cannot understand, casts another into a sleep, a trance. Here is this creature, for good or for ill, at his mercy, in his power. What does he do? Teach him some great truth? Force from him some vital secret? Subdue the acknowledged evil in him to some good end? No. He makes him find a pin, drink a glass of water, blow his nose. Then, having accomplished this noble end at some expenditure of his own vital force, he awakens the sleeper; and what is gained? A dozen fools have gaped, cried: ‘Marvellous!’ or, ‘Well, I never!’ according to their measure of refinement, and gone their ways no whit wiser than before.” “Yes, well, and you? How do you use this force?” “In different ways. Sometimes to extort an enemy’s secret, sometimes to test a woman’s faith--but this last not often; for experience and Mahomet teach us that women have no souls, and that by concerning ourselves more with what they do than with what they feel, we shall spare ourselves many disappointments.” “You are a Mahometan then?” “With the modifications which result from long contact with men of other faiths. Thus I drink wine, in moderation; I look upon images and statues without horror; and I believe that by springing from a race whose men have for generations believed that women may have spiritual life, the best of your European maids do indeed attain in time to something which may pass for a soul.” “And Nouna?” The merchant smiled. “Ask Mrs. Ellis, her guardian, who has known her for some years, what impression the bible-readings, the church-goings, the preachings, the prayings, the exhortations of her Christian teachers have had on her, the letters of her mother, whom she adores, and who never writes to her daughter without an exhortation to religion! All the bishops in the world would not make Nouna more of a Christian than her Persian kittens.” “You can say as much of many English girls,” said Lauriston hastily and uneasily.