“It has been amusing to us to see you two struggle against our psychical intrusions,” Mary remarked, at this point. “We do push the pencil. We also reach the mind. Sometimes the one, sometimes the other, is what does the trick. It is easier for us to impress the mind, but harder for you to recognize that suggestion as ours. You think it’s your own, and fight. Margaret is even more resistant than Manzie—perhaps because she has more responsibility to other people.” “Are present conditions—the gathering of the clans for the coming struggle—going to enable many people to do this, who have never done it before and otherwise would have been unable to do it?” he asked. “Yes; but the danger of that is that the other forces will find their own channels, and steal and defile some of ours. So we can’t advise people to experiment, unless they can absolutely identify the force here, and only a few, comparatively, can do that.” He said that he had hesitated to ask questions of his own pencil, being unwilling to go too far in this until he had checked it up through me. “He’s scairt,” she teased, before he had fairly started to speak. “You don’t trust yourself or me.” Laughing, he retorted: “That’s another!” “You are right to be careful,” she went on, serious again. “It’s a dangerous adventure, unless you keep your balance, follow your own purpose, keep close tab on the force handling the pencil, and lean on it only spiritually. The minute advice in material things is sought, that minute there is danger.” “There’s no danger that anybody can impersonate you and fool me,” he declared. “Never! The danger is that somebody might lie to you about me; or if you cease to stand on your own feet and make your own choice in matters of your plane, only then somebody might impersonate me for a moment. Sometimes I can tell you those things, but the habit of depending on them is bad for you.” A night or two later, beginning with a reply to a question concerning another subject, she returned to the discussion of the force used in conveying these communications—“a force compared to which electricity is like spring water,” she said—declaring, like Frederick, that its explanation is still impossible in terms of our plane. “There is a vital and potent force, not yet isolated—and hardly discovered—by your most advanced scientists,” she told us. “It has characteristics and attractions not explainable until its discovery and analysis give rise to a new set of words. There is no adequate comparison that may be used to indicate its force, or the conditions and degrees of its variations. It has some resemblance to electricity, yet the comparison in certain cases would be misleading.”