"I hate it; it makes me feel unclean, as if I hadn't washed all day. And there's a sense of unclean things prowling about one ... It shatters my nerves a night like this." "I wonder if I don't feel that way too, really," Nan said in a low dead voice. "Look, Gertrude, are you too tired to work the board again tonight?" "You mean you want to try again?" Nan nodded. "Of course I could keep it up for a little while," said Gertrude Fagan, getting eagerly to her feet. "You're sure your aunt won't mind if I spend the night? Seeing me appear mysteriously at the breakfast table might surprise her." "Poor Aunt M., she's gone beyond surprise, Gertrude; she probably won't recognize you. It's almost as if she were dead." "Horrible! She was such a brilliant person ... I always felt there was a strange magnetism about her, something I couldn't explain, like about you. Probably all your family had it ... What a nice room this is, the antithesis of those horrible paths across the Common ... O, didn't you feel it, Nancibel, in the theatre and shoving our way through the crowd home, a horrible lack of spirituality in all the faces?" "Rather that they have strange secrets I can never know." Nan was leaning over the chiffonier, fumbling in a drawer. "Here's the ouija board." She turned into the swath of light, holding out before her a yellow varnished board with a semicircle of letters on it. "He taught you to think that. His was an earthspirit. Now he is purified." "Please, Gertrude,... You never knew him," Nan snapped out. Her fingers were taut about the edge of the ouija board. "Why, I met him several times." "I mean really knew him." "Why are you angry at me, Nancibel?" Without answering, Nan began taking the books off the small table where the reading light stood. She drew up two chairs and put a small three-legged wooden pointer on the board. Then she went to the window again and looked down into the welter of broken lights and green-spun shadows of the Public Garden. That night of premature spring the three of them had walked into town under a sky of coppery flame and all the streets had seemed to fall into a procession behind them and they had seemed gay and strong enough to trample the whole world, was this all it led to these choking lilacs that smelt of death? Or was it all mirage, false? Behind her she could feel Gertrude Fagan moving restlessly about the room. Nan half closed her eyes and breathed deep of the fetor of blossoms and gasoline and lurking bodies; then came back to the table, her face still and pale. Gertrude Fagan already sat at the table with the tips of her fingers on the wooden pointer, her eyes black, fixed on the black of the window. "Think of him, Nancibel," she said in a shaky voice. Nan put her fingers on the other end of the pointer and closed her eyes. Above the pounding of her heart she could hear the slow rasp of the other girl's breathing. So they waited. IX