Once I was directed by a spirit as to how to paint a portrait. It was out in the Middle West. Not quite so bad as the woman in London who used to have interviews with one of her children born dead. In this case it was the ouija board that operated every night and gave me my instructions for the next day as to how to get the right expression upon the face of this elderly woman who was sitting to me. A brother, born four years before herself, had died at the age of five, and in that other life, “over there,” he had kept in touch with the march of events down here. When his sister journeyed, he journeyed with her, miraculously learning the language of each country in which she happened to stop, so that he could send her messages with a foreign flavor. He told her what to do when she was ill and how to meet every problem of life, but with all this vast knowledge he could not, or did not, tell her how to keep young; and I had just as hard a time disguising the wrinkles on her cheek and the cords in her neck as if she had been an ordinary human being with no little brother guiding her from another world. I could not but think—what a dull heaven to live in—so irrevocably tied to this earth. This spirit was at the beck and call of his sister, doomed to follow her every thought and action, with far less freedom than if he had remained a poor mortal. I would rather sit on a cloud with a ready-made halo about my head, and at least have time for contemplation. Now that I am on the subject of women—I do not mean to criticize harshly (I have loved them all my life), but one thought leads to another. There is the case of Mrs. McAllister. Of course, that was not her name, but it will do as well as any other. Virgil Williams and myself were once invited to her house in San Francisco to see a statue she had made. We were told beforehand that this woman was one of the few beings who disproved the theory that starving in a garret was necessary to be a success in the fine arts. The death of her husband left her enormously wealthy, and she decided to show her talents. First she wrote a best seller; then she composed a concerto; then she painted and finally, probably holding the belief that all the arts are interrelated, she tried her hand at sculpture. This, a statue of Eve, was the object we were asked to view. Williams, after looking at it awhile, said: “Happily, Mrs. McAllister, we have both been married, and so I can speak most freely. You have evidently forgotten one thing which is more important than you think. You have neglected to put in the navel.” “Oh, not forgetfulness, Mr. Williams,” cried this ultramodern woman (psychoanalysis and sex discussion were not so free as they are to-day). “In consulting with my spiritual adviser, the Reverend Mr. McCann, we decided that as Eve was not born of woman, a navel was unnecessary.”