Great ladies and the
country-houses courted him because of a certain wit, a certain
charm--above all, a certain spiritual power--which piqued the worldling.
He flouted and refused the great ladies--with a smile, however, which
gave no offence; and he knew, notwithstanding, everybody whom he wanted
to know. Occasionally he made quiet spaces in his life, and disappeared
from London for days or weeks. When he reappeared it was often with a
battered and exhausted air, as of one from whom virtue had gone out. He
was, in truth, a mystic of a secular kind: very difficult to class
religiously, though he called himself a member of the Society of
Friends. Lady Lucy, who was of Quaker extraction, recognized in his ways
and phrases echoes from the meetings and influences of her youth. But,
in reality, he was self-taught and self-formed, on the lines of an
Evangelical tradition, which had owed something, a couple of generations
back, among his Danish forebears, to the influence of Emanuel
Swedenborg. This tradition had not only been conveyed to him by a
beloved and saintly mother; it had been appropriated by the man's inmost
forces. What he believed in, with all mystics, was _prayer_--an intimate
and ineffable communion between the heart and God.
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