He was shot like a ball from a cannon, in and out, up and down, and round and round the Vanderhook laboratory. He was projected with fearful speed along the fatal pathway of that deadly attraction.
Words can not exploit the possibilities of electricity when centered upon a human organism, however attenuated. Up to this last moment the captive had been stirred only by his internal emotions of baffled love, and of deadly fear. Now, however, to internal agony was added outward destruction. To the convulsions of the soul were added the contortions of the body, and with every revolution of the fatal cylinder the reappearing envelope of the doomed soul was seen to be shrinking and shriveling out of all semblance to a man.
What at breakfast had been the lithe and debonnair Gnani of Gingalee, a transparent and elegant gentleman, was now but a thick, cloudy shape, an opaque, formless figure, an unhandsome thing resembling the body of a bent, crooked and deformed child.
He beamed upon the exhibit with satanic glee. He laughed for joy over the pallid and lifeless thing whirling under his hand. He emitted a low whistle of profound satisfaction. He made notes in his book with excited dots and dashes. At last his triumph broke all bounds. He roared like a whole grandstand at the last touchdown.
"I say, Genesy, that's what you call a _Nee_go on the home run. Get onto the size of him. Looks like 'leven cents, don't he? Dollars to dimes he hasn't enough mysticism left to illuminate a hollow punkin. The next Gooroo from Gingalee won't run up against an Edison plant. If he does, he'll find he isn't the whole push. Just look at the shape of him. Now ain't you stuck on that? And isn't he just swinging round the circle like a presidential candidate? Well, well, well, I say, Genesy, if this don't beat the tom-tom."
The transformation of the mystic was sustaining the hypothesis of the materialist. The reduction of the astral man was a visible, tangible and scientific fact.
And Imogene, the faithless,--what did she? She gazed and shuddered. That which she saw was not her ideal. It was no longer her lover. Nor was it a man. It was not even suitable bric-a-brac for a refined home. It was only a Spectacle.