Myself. "He has probably been investigating the habits of the Australian aborigines."
Myself. "Men, or, as you would say, spirits, like us in a few respects, but utterly different in most."
Spirit. "Then this account of them tallies with nothing in your experience."
Myself. "No, but they exist all right. There's no doubt of that."
Spirit. "I question it. In any case, I could not accept your word as evidence, seeing that you have neither seen them yourself nor met with anyone who has."
And so on, you know (the Researcher muttered, flicking over the pages of his note-book).
He was infernally sceptical about those aborigines. It seems that he had had a tremendous argument with the other investigator about the possibility of "spirits" being black and naked, and he was dead set on proving that he had been right. I think, as a matter of fact, that what I said tended to confirm him in his theory. He put it that if there were such spirits on this plane, I must have seen them or have had some quite first-hand evidence of their existence; and when I said that I had seen black people, Indians, and so on, he cross-examined me until I got confused. You see, I had to confess that they weren't, strictly speaking, black, that they wore clothes, and washed, and lived in houses; and he got me involved in apparent contradictions--you have no idea how easy it is, when you are trying to be very lucid--and then he changed the subject with the remark that I was a very poor witness.
It was about this time that I began to lose my temper. It was after three o'clock when we got to that point, and I was getting very tired, and, strange as it may appear, curiously doubtful about my own existence. I had for some time been coming to the conclusion that he did not quite believe in my reality; and after he had dismissed my account of the black races as being untrustworthy, he said, half to himself, that quite probably I was nothing more than an hallucination, a thought projection of his own mind. And after that I got more and more annoyed--partly, I think, because I had a kind of haunting fear that what he had said might be true. When you have been talking to a spirit for over three hours in the middle of the night, you are liable to doubt anything.