Here at last he met men and women of his own sort, men and women of birth and breeding and intelligence, whom no cheap claptrap could convince, no vulgar jugglery deceive. And yet these people, keen and apparently sensible, believed passionately and whole-heartedly in the manifestations they evoked. Their lives were ruled by ghostly advice elicited at their meetings, their desolation consoled by almost daily conversation with their beloved dead, their doubts turned into certainty on all points by revelations from beyond the grave. They claimed impartiality, and cultivated pure enthusiasm. And if the tragedy of the pitiful, unholy quest had been bitterly heart-rending among the illiterate and credulous crowds that haunted Mr. Muddock’s circles, and sustained themselves with ‘demonstrations’ and aitchless conversation with the inferior dead, far more so was it among these people of Kingston’s own world, where devotion served as conviction, and the anguish of longing was forced to masquerade as its own fulfilment. It was indeed a poignant, tragic life in which Kingston now found himself. Men and women, one and all, were gaunt and haggard of soul with their insatiable hunger. Some of them seemed philosophers, convinced that they were following on the track of a clear truth; others were manifest saints, gentle sacred souls, hopefully worshipping a Holy Grail of their own desire’s invention. Exalted, inspired, rarefied, filled with an apparent serenity of devotion, their company gave an impression of strange unearthly happiness, until the keen edge of their underlying agony was seen piercing through the superficial calm of their lives. The whole air round them was poisoned by loss and the inability to bear it. Their souls lived in a fierce, unacknowledged groping after the lost things they had loved. Men for vanished friends, women for lovers and children long dead--each had some dreadful secret craving, some inner infidelity towards the Eternal Mercy of life. There were old polished men of their world, strong intellects sapped, and keen eyes dulled in one direction only, by some hoarded passion never to be parted with, not even for the sake of happiness and peace and wisdom. There were beautiful white-haired women, sweet and gracious with much sorrow in bygone years, tired with recollections, and divorced from the heats of life, yet still held in a bitter bondage, drugging their pain with this piteous, passionate cult for the burden they had lost. Life and death had combined to offer them calm and release from torment; but they would have none of any such release--clung to the ghost of their dead torment, and redoubled it by the zest with which they told themselves that they soothed it.