“But,” objected Leslie, “though that may be so, yet still the Good, that Is the person, does inhere in an alien stuff—­the body.”

“But,” I replied,"is the body alien?  Is it not rather an expression of the person? as essential, somehow or other, as the soul?”

“Certainly!” cried Ellis.  “Give me the flesh, the flesh!

  “’Not with my soul, Love!—­bid no soul like mine
  Lap thee around nor leave the poor sense room! 
  Take sense too—­let me love entire and whole—­
        Not with my soul.’”

“I don’t agree with the sentiment of that,” said Leslie, “and anyhow, I don’t see how it bears on the question.  For the point of the poem is rather to emphasize than to deny the opposition between body and soul.”

“Yes,” replied Ellis, “but also to suggest what you idealists call the transcending of it.”

“Do you mean that in the marriage relation, for example ...”

“Yes, I mean that in that act the flesh, so to speak, is annihilated at the very moment of its assertion, and what you get is a feeling of total union with the person, body and soul at once, or rather, neither one nor the other, but simply that which is in and through both.”

“I should have thought,” objected Leslie, “it was rather a case of the soul being merged in the body.”

“That depends,” replied Ellis.

“Yes,” I said, “it depends on many things!  But what I was thinking of was that, quite apart from that experience, and in the moments of sober observation, one does feel, does one not, a ^correspondence between body and soul, as though the one were the expression of the other?”

“I don’t know,” objected Audubon.  “What I feel is much more often a discrepancy.”

“But still,” I urged, “even when there appears to be a discrepancy to begin with, don’t you think that in the course of years the spirit does tend to stamp its own likeness on the flesh, and especially on the features of the face?”

“‘For soul is form,’” quoted Leslie, “‘and doth the body make.’”

“Yes,” I said, “and that verse, I believe, is not merely a beautiful fancy of the poet’s, but rather as the Greeks maintained—­and on such a point they were good judges—­a profound and significant truth.  At any rate, I find it to be so in the case of the people I care about—­though there I know Audubon will dissent.  In them, every change of expression, every tone of voice, every gesture has its significance; there is nothing that is not expressive—­not a curl of the hair, not a lift of the eyebrows, not a trick of speech or gait.  The body becomes, as it were, transparent and pervious to the soul; and that inexplicable element of sense, which baffles us everywhere else, seems here at last to receive its explanation in presenting itself as the perfect medium of spirit.”

“If you come to that,” cried Ellis, “you might as well extend your remarks to the clothes.  For they, to a lover’s eyes, are often as expressive and adorable as the body itself.”