He was inwardly groping for his poise. He could think well enough, but it disturbed him to feel the need to avoid the other's eyes. He liked the shaping of the conversation and knew that Bellingham felt himself unknown. Charter realized, too, that he would strike fire if he hammered long enough, but there was malevolence in the swift expenditure of energy demanded. Bellingham smiled again. "Then you think it is inevitable that the end of man is--the clouds?" "The aspiration of the spirit, I should say, is to be relieved of feet of clay.... Immortality in the body--that's an unbreakable paradox to me. I'm laminated, Harveyized against anything except making a fine tentative instrument of the body." "You think, then, that the spirit grows as the body wastes?" "Orientals have encountered starvation with astonishing results to philosophy," Charter remarked. "But I was thinking only of a body firmly helmed by a clean mind. The best I have within me declares that the fleshly wrapping becomes at the end but a cumbering cerement; that through life, it is a spirit-vault. When I pamper the body, following its fitful and imperious appetites, I surely stiffen the seals of the vault. In my hours in which the senses are dominant the spirit shrinks in abhorrence; just as it thrills, warms and expands in rarer moments of nobility." "Then the old martyrs and saints who macerated themselves wove great folds of spirit?" The inconsequential manner of the question urged Charter to greater effort to detach, if possible, for a moment at least, the other's Ego. "In ideal," he went on, "I should be as careless of food as Thoreau, as careless of physical pain as Suso. As for the reproductive devil incarnated in man--it, and all its ramifications, since the most delicate and delightful of these so often betray--I should encase in the coldest steel of repression----" "You say, in ideal," Bellingham ventured quietly. "... But are not these great forces splendid fuel for the mind? Prodigious mental workers have said so." "A common view," said Charter, who regarded the remark as characteristic. "Certain mental workers are fond of expressing this. You hear it everywhere with a sort of 'Eureka.' Strength of the loins is but a coarse inflammation to the mind. A man may use such excess strength, earned by continence, in the production of exotics, feverish lyrics, and in depicting summer passions, but the truth is, that so long as that force is not censored, shriven and sterilized--it is the same jungle pestilence, and will color the mind with impurity. It is much better where it belongs--than in the mind." "You do not believe in the wild torrents, the forked lightnings, and the shocking thunders of the poets?"