“Well, I will try,” said Mrs. Graves.  “Let me think.”  She sate silent for a little, and then she said:  “I think that as I get older, I recognise more and more the division between the rational part of the mind and the instinctive part of the mind.  I find more and more that my deepest convictions are not rational—­at least not arrived at by reason—­only formulated by it.  I think that reason ought to be able to formulate convictions; but they are there, whether expressed or not.  Most women don’t bring the reason to bear at all, and the result is that they hold a mass of beliefs, some simply inherited, some mere phrases which they don’t understand, and some real convictions.  A great deal of the muddle comes from the feminine weariness of logic, and a great deal, too, from the fact that they never learn how to use words—­words are the things that divide people!  But I believe more and more, by experience, in the soul.  I do not believe that the soul begins with birth or ends with death.  Now I have no sort of doubt in my own mind that the soul of your child was a living thing, a spirit which has lived before, and will live again.  Souls, I believe, come to the brink of life, out of some unknown place, and by choice or impelled by some need for experience, take shape.  I don’t know how or why this is—­I only believe that it is so.  If your child had lived, you would have become aware of its soul; you would have found it to have perfectly distinct qualities and desires and views of its own, not learnt from you, and which you could not affect or change.  All those qualities are in it from the time of birth—­but it takes a soul some time to learn the use of the body.  But the connection between the soul and the father and mother who give it a body is a real one; I don’t profess to know what it is, or why it is that some parents have congenial children and some quite uncongenial ones—­ that is only one of the many mysteries which beset us.  Holding all this, it does not seem to me on the face of it impossible that the soul of the child should have been brought into contact with Maud’s soul; though of course the whole affair is quite capable of a scientific and material explanation.  But I have seen too many strange things in my life to make me accept the scientific explanation as conclusive.  I have known men and women who, after a bereavement, have had an intense consciousness of the presence of the beloved spirit with them and near them.  I have experienced it myself; and it seems to me as impossible to explain as a sense of beauty.  If one feels a particular thing to be beautiful, one can’t give good reasons for one’s emotion to a person who does not think the same thing beautiful; but it appears to me that the duty of explaining it away lies on the one who does not feel it.  One can’t say that beauty is a purely subjective thing, because when two people think a thing beautiful, they understand each other perfectly.  Do I make myself clear at all, or is that merely a bit of feminine logic?”