But whether it was his winning way or his foreign reputation, he was accepted gravely, and ideas won consideration, enunciated by him, that would have been looked on as mad, coming from me....

Again the faculty were nonplussed ... puzzled....

Dineen, Van Maarden and I were together much.  And the latter found more delight in the time when he could discuss freely and unacademically with me than when he was invited to formal teas and dinners by the weightier members of the faculty and community.

It was psychic research that we particularly discussed.  Van Maarden was the greatest scholar in the Mystic, the Occult, the Spiritualistic that I have ever met.  He claimed to be able to go out of the body at will and see what any friend was up to at any time, in any out-of-the-way place in the world....

When I jested that such a faculty might sometimes prove embarrassing to his friends, he laughed and slapped me on the back.

* * * * *

Dineen was a queer little chap.  He roomed de luxe at the Bellman House.

One night, during a cyclone that swept the town and the adjacent country, a fragment of roof was lifted off the hostelry in which he dwelt.  The women-servants and waitresses were thrown into a panic.  One, who collapsed on a lounge in the upstairs hall, swore that Dineen had felt of her leg as she lay there.  A scandal was started.  I know that Dineen, in his European fashion, was free with his hands, when he meant no harm.  He had merely laid his hand on the girl’s leg, in friendly fashion, and asked if she was hurt.

But the nasty Puritan mind of the community went to work, and the story was hawked about that Professor Dineen, taking advantage of the cyclone, had tried to “feel the girl up.”

This, and the fact that he had been a friend of mine (after my forthcoming scandal it counted strongly against him) later effected in his being requested to resign from the faculty.

But the real cause of the brilliant, strange man’s persecution was the jealousy of the dean of the philosophical department of the former’s real ability.

* * * * *

“We must do more for this man than we have ... he is a genius ... he has not enough money to return to Europe on....

“He has written a curious, mad play called Iistral ... one dealing with psychic phenomena, which we ought to put on....

“That way we’ll net him three or four hundred dollars.”

It was Dineen who spoke.

We chanced to be walking up the Hill together.

* * * * *

The school cheer-leader was tall and statuesque, and his voice was deep and resonant ... but, though pleased with his stature and his vocal qualifications, Van Maarden decided on me to play the lead in his abnormal play....  I did not possess as fine a voice, but I knew the mystics almost as well as he did....  I believed in spiritism, and would be accordantly sympathetic with the author’s ideas....