But now, here in this room, beside the motionless body of his mother, he began to think. He had a good mind. His father had left him a rich legacy in his splendid body, but also something mental--latent to this hour--which produced an irritating impatience with the vague and the mysterious. He resented the intrusion of an insoluble element into his thinking. He was repelled by the discovery that his mother was abnormal, and from the point of view of this "ghost-room" his life at the university was becoming sweeter, more precious, more normal every hour. Then, too, his afternoon of reading at the library had put into his mind several new and all-powerful conceptions which had germinated there like the seeds which the Indian "adept" plants in pots of sand, rising, burgeoning, blossoming on the instant. He knew the names of some of those men whose words might be counted on the side of his mother's endowment, for they were famous in physical or moral science, but he had not known before that they admitted any real belief in the kind of things which his mother professed to perform. The conception that the human soul was (as the ancients believed) a ponderable, potent entity capable of separating itself from the body, came to him with overwhelming significance. "If mother still lives," he said to the nurse, "where is she? What form has she taken?" Mrs. Post, in her own way, was capable of expressing herself. "She is not there. So much we know. Her body is here. It is like a cloak which she has thrown down. She herself is invisible, but she will return and take up her body, and then you will see it grow warm again and her eyes will light up like lamps, and she will rise and speak to you." Of course he did not believe this. That her body was a cast-off garment was easy to comprehend, but that her spirit hovered near and would re-enter its former habitation was incredible. All day he remained there, pacing to and fro, or sitting bent and somber over his problem. At noon he got a little lunch for himself and for the nurse. At two o'clock Mrs. Joyce returned to take him for a drive in her car. But this he again refused. Thereupon she went away, promising to look in again later in the evening. At dusk he stole down into the street to mail a letter to Frensen, wherein he had written: "I am a good deal of a broken reed to-day, but I am going to fight. I wish you were here to talk things over with me. I'm surrounded by people who believe in the supernatural, and I need some one like yourself to brace me up."