"In those trances--if they are really trances--the voices come in all sorts of ways to me. I cannot understand it; it scares me and yet I have grown to wish to hear them--some of them. For they are very, very different. Some voices are like children talking low, almost lisping, and always musical, and others are cold and hard; but--Alfred, is not this wonderful? I can drive those hard, stern voices off, by just wishing them away; my mind does it somehow, and the others come to me when I wish them to--O! but it is marvelous."
Her eyes were lit again with a saintly joy--a little wild I thought--and for a moment I shuddered at the thought that perhaps Gabrielle was losing her mind, under the stress of her hallucinations. Ah! but were they hallucinations? I was not unwilling to believe them. Both Gabrielle and I had indulged in the reading of ghostly tales, when children, and because it was just a little difficult for us to gratify our fancy for the weird and the supernatural--all the eccentricities of the disembodied--we had loved them the more.
We were interrupted in our talk by some call for Gabrielle, and I was left alone to ponder the strange matter, with I think, a crude kind of expectancy that we approached transcendent mysteries, dwelling unconfessed in my mind. But I was not a little alarmed also. Gabrielle's delicate texture, her spiritualized emotions, which also in their poignant intensity of feeling assumed now to me the aspect of a thaumaturgic power, might induce some mental derangement. Uncertain what to do, and unwilling to tell the affair to our parents, who would only see in it a new urgency for Gabrielle's transportation to changed fields of association, I concluded to confide everything Gabrielle had told me to Blanchette.
Blanchette was incredulous. She could not believe it. It offended her robust sense of actual living and the sharp realization in her of the materiality of the senses. You see in Blanchette something of the captain's skepticism, his naked Voltairism had developed. She was silent for a while, and then answered very slowly my question, "What is best to do?"
"Alfred, Gabrielle is unwell; you must get her away. She lives too lonely a life, reads too much, and is unsociable. Let her once live among the hard facts of the hospital, and the training school, and--Ah! then--it will all go, like the fogs--_comme les brouillards s'evanouis-saient quand le soleil les éclate_. Eh? Alfred, you know that."