as he expressed it, unlocked new doors in his mind and put him in touch with the ancestral memories of his race." And Mrs. Sharp quotes him further as declaring "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Perhaps; but I doubt if, after the Celtic Renaissance had won a hearing, anything could have prevented Sharp from following what was, after all, a natural bent. I am not going to argue the matter out, but he himself admitted that his development as "Fiona Macleod" began "while I was still a child," and there is proof in almost every volume he published, even before he knew Mrs. Rinder ("E. W. R.," must of course be the author of "The Shadow of Arvor"), that his tendency was toward what became characteristic of "Fiona Macleod."
It was the love that Sharp had for all sorts of "psychic things," the mysterious, the unaccountable, the hidden, that led him to believe that "without her there would have been no 'Fiona Macleod.'" Sharp himself, when his "other self," with sense of humor alert, was more than willing to admit that it is easy to believe what one wishes to believe; and he delighted to tell a story at the expense of Mr. Yeats illustrative of the trite fact. Sharp went one day, in London, to call on Mr. Yeats. When lunch-time came, they set about cooking eggs. Mr. Yeats held them in a frying-pan over the little fire in the grate. As they slipped about, Mr. Yeats, all the while looking back in the room away from the fire as he talked to Sharp, allowed the pan to tip too far and the eggs fell out into the fire. So absorbed was he in the topic of conversation, most appropriately the disappearance of material things,
