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Dr. Grosnoff, who was present, expressed great delight. His patient was coming along well mentally, at least. Alice sat down, trembling.

“But, good Lord, Tristan,” I said, “what possible occupation could you follow?”

“Oh, I’ve brooded over that for weeks, and I’ve crossed the Rubicon. I think we’re a long way past such petty things as personal pride. Did it ever occur to you that what from one point of view is a monstrous catastrophe, from another is an asset?”

“What in the dickens are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’m talking about the–the–” he gulped painfully–“the stage.”

Alice wrung her hands, crying bitterly:

“Wonderful! Splendid! Tristan LeHuber, The World’s Unparalleled Upside-Down Man! He Doesn’t Know Whether He’s On His Head Or His Heels. He’s Always Up In The Air About Something, But You Can’t Upset Him! Vaudeville To-night–The Bodongo Brothers, Brilliant Burmese Balancers–Arctic Annie, the Prima Donna of Sealdom, and Tristan LeHuber, The Balloon Man–He Uses An Anchor For A Parachute!” At last indeed the LeHuber family will have arrived sensationally in the public eye!

“There are,” Alice raved, “two billion people on the earth to-day. Counting three generations per century, there have been about twelve billion of us in the last two hundred years. And out of all those, and all the millions and billions before that, we had to be picked for this loathsome cosmic joke–just little us for all that distinction! Why, oh, why? If our romance had to be spoiled by a tragedy smeared across the billboards of notoriety, why couldn’t it have been in some decent, human sort of way? Why this ghastly absurdity?”

“From time immemorial,” said Grosnoff, “there have been men who sought to excite the admiration of their fellows, to get themselves worshiped, to dominate, to collect perquisites, by developing some wonderful personal power or another. From Icarus on down, levitation or its equivalent has been a favorite. The ecstatics of medieval times, the Hindu Yogis, even the day-dreaming schoolboy, have had visions of floating in air before the astounding multitudes by a mere act of will. The frequency of ‘flying dreams’ may indicate such a thing as a possibility in nature. Tradition says many have accomplished it. If so, it was by a reversal of polarity through an act of will. Those who did it–Yogis–believed in successive lives on earth. If they were right about the one, why not the other? Suppose one who had developed that power of will, carried it to another birth, where it lay dormant in the subconscious until set off uncontrolled by some special shock?”

Alice paled.

“Then Tristan might have been–“

“He might. Then again, maybe my brain is addled by this thing. In any case, the moral is: don’t monkey with Nature! She’s particular.”

* * * * *

Tristan’s vaudeville scheme was not as easily realized as said. The first manager to whom we applied was stubbornly skeptical in spite of Tristan’s appearance standing upside down in stilts heavily weighted at the ground ends; and even after his resistance was broken down in a manner which left him gasping and a little woozy, began to reason unfavorably in a hard-headed way. Audiences, he explained, were off levitation acts. Too old. No matter what you did, they’d lay it to concealed wires, and yawn. Even if you called a committee from the audience, the committee itself would merely be sore at not being able to solve the trick; the audience would consider the committee a fake or merely dumb. And all that would take too much time for an act of that kind.

“Oh, yeh, I know! It’s got me goin’, all right. But I can’t think like me about this sorta thing. I got to think like the audience does–or go outa business!”

After which solid but unprofitable lesson in psychology, we dropped the last vestige of pride and tried a circus sideshow. But the results were similar.