“This, my once friend, this”--and Lonnie now well started, talked straight on. “Through my higher comprehension of primordial principles, and by my occult manipulations of certain astral forces (quite unknown to such as you), I erstwhile learned the most profound fact in nature. I was, as we say in our cult, able to visionize my Soul Mate. The doors of the future, as it were, lifted from their hinges, and--Aha! you start. You tremble. You sense my secret. You perceive the mystical meaning of my metaphysical meanderings.” Alonzo Leffingwell paused, gazing fixedly at Bill, who was now nervously rinsing the glasses. “You have guessed,” and the Mystic’s voice fell to a sharp whisper. “Miss Sheets is SHE,--she whom I cognized in the astral. She is _not_ your affinity, but _mine_. Did you not perceive that we needed no introduction? Our higher selves responded to the law; hence my agitation, and your--your--KARMA.” Bill Vanderhook stopped short, straightened himself. He quit tinkering with the stock. Continued Lonnie remorselessly,-- “Knowing, as I do, that our union is inevitable in the course of evolutionary processes, I thought best so to inform you, and as it were, take her off your hands. You are, I trust, too wise to attempt any interference with the immutable.” Bill Vanderhook stared at his chum for a minute, and then broke into a big, loud laugh. “Well, at least you’re candid,” he said--“more so than most fellows who find their affinities,”--and he carelessly mopped off the marble slab. “At the same time,”--and his voice roughened--“you’ll excuse me for saying that you’re off your base, and that I hold the age over your astral informant, whatever his degree of asininity.” “And you mean to say that you will not relinquish her? That you will defy the decrees of nature? That you will violate the principles of primordial biogen? That you will ignore the ‘Harmonics of Evolution?’” And Alonzo’s eyes again rested on the labels of the soda fountain. “To the first,--Nit. To the secondly, thirdly and fourthly,--Yep. Now, you get it?”--and Bill looked very tired. “O, earthy and unillumined!” murmured the pale, young enthusiast,--“would that I could but for a moment open up to your clouded understanding the mystical and unintelligible explications of one whom I, even I, acknowledge to be a deeper, more profound and more mysterious Mystic than MYSELF. “What you need, O, dense, chaotic soul, is--EX-PLI-CA-TION, Explication that will Explain. Hear me, poor groveler amid the rudimentary manifestations of matter. Harken to me ere it be too late. Hear me, O, my boyhood’s chum. Hear the words of misty meaning which have flowed in boundless streams from this modern Mystic, that Far-Off-One in Manhattan Isle. These are the words of one upon whose wisdom I feed, the words of one who KNOWS, and--and--I whisper to you in secret, one who admits that he is--a--_Mystic_.