He talked a good real of "Karma," of "materialisations" and of the "plurality of spheres." He used many other strange words by means of which he made it clear to me that my faery would reveal herself to me only by his help. With beating heart I entered a dark room at the appointed hour. The magician led me in. A soft, mysterious music floated toward me. I was left alone, pressed to the door, awaiting the things that were to come in breathless fear. Suddenly, as I was waiting in the darkness, a gleaming, bluish needle protruded from the floor. It grew to rings and became a snake which breathed forth flames and dissolved into flame ... And the tongues of these flames played on all sides and finally parted in curves like the leaves of an opening lotus flower, out of whose calix white veils arose slowly, very slowly, and became as they glided upward the garments of a woman who looked at me, who was lashed by fear, with sightless eyes. "Are you Thea?" I asked trembling. The veils inclined in affirmation. "Where do you dwell?" The veils waved, shaken by the trembling limbs. "Ask me after other things," a muffled voice said. "Why do you no longer appear to me?" "I may not." "Who hinders you?" "You." ... "By what? Am I unworthy of you?" "Yes." In deep contrition I was about to fall at her feet. But, coming nearer, I perceived that my faery's breath smelled of onions. This circumstance sobered me a bit, for I don't like onions. I knocked at the locked door, paid my magician what I owed him and went my way. From now on all hope of ever seeing her again vanished. But my soul cried out after her. And the world receded from me. Its figures dislimned into things that have been, its noise did not thunder at my threshold. A solitariness half voluntary and half enforced dragged its steps through my house. Only a few, the intimates of my heart and brothers of my blood, surrounded my life with peace and kept watch without my doors. * * * * * It was a late afternoon near Advent Sunday. But no message of Christmas came to my yearning soul. Somewhere, like a discarded toy, lay amid rubbish the motive power of my passions. My heart was dumb, my hand nerveless, and even need--that last incentive--had slackened to a wild memory. The world was white with frost.... The dust of ice and the rain of star-light filled the world... cloths of glittering white covered the plains.... The bare twigs of the trees stretched upwards like staves of coral.... The fir trees trembled like spun glass. A red sunset spread its reflection over all. But the sunset itself was poverty stricken. No purple lights, no gleam of seven colours warmed the whiteness of the world. Not like the gentle farewell of the sun but cruel as the threat of paralysing night did the bloody stripe stare through my window. It is the hour of afternoon tea. The regulations of the house demand that.