We passed the Wellses’ house on our way to Mrs. Dane’s that night, and my wife commented on the dark condition of the lower floor.
“Even if they are going out,” she said, “it would add to the appearance of the street to leave a light or two burning. But some people have no public feeling.”
I made no comment, I believe. The Wellses were a young couple, with children, and had been known to observe that they considered the neighborhood “stodgy.” And we had retaliated, I regret to say, in kind, but not with any real unkindness, by regarding them as interlopers. They drove too many cars, and drove them too fast; they kept a governess and didn’t see enough of their children; and their English butler made our neat maids look commonplace.
There is generally, in every old neighborhood, some one house on which is fixed, so to speak, the community gaze, and in our case it was on the Arthur Wellses’. It was a curious, not unfriendly staring, much I daresay like that of the old robin who sees two young wild canaries building near her.
We passed the house, and went on to Mrs. Dane’s.
She had given us no inkling of what we were to have that night, and my wife conjectured a conjurer! She gave me rather a triumphant smile when we were received in the library and the doors into the drawing-room were seen to be tightly closed.
We were early, as my wife is a punctual person, and soon after our arrival Sperry came. Mrs. Dane was in her chair as usual, with her companion in attendance, and when she heard Sperry’s voice outside she excused herself and was wheeled out to him, and together we heard them go into the drawing-room. When the Robinsons arrived she and Sperry reappeared, and we waited for her customary announcement of the evening’s program. When none came, even during the meal, I confess that my curiosity was almost painful.
I think, looking back, that it was Sperry who turned the talk to the supernatural, and that, to the accompaniment of considerable gibing by the men, he told a ghost story that set the women to looking back over their shoulders into the dark corners beyond the zone of candle-light. All of us, I remember, except Sperry and Mrs. Dane, were skeptical as to the supernatural, and Herbert Robinson believed that while there were so-called sensitives who actually went into trance, the controls which took possession of them were buried personalities of their own, released during trance from the sub-conscious mind.