Mrs. Medford turned upon her, a little acrid. You may have noticed that the two kinds of “Catholic” don’t mix very well. “Has the Church decided that it’s all your subconscious?” Mrs. Conway’s smile was all that she herself could have wished it to be. “Why, I believe so. Where else could they get it?” “Whom do you mean by ‘they’?” the other woman challenged. “Why, the evil spirits.” Mrs. Conway reached for a mint drop. “You see, the Church has had all this to settle so _many_ centuries ago. It’s hardly a new phenomenon.” If there was irony in Mrs. Conway’s tone, it was not sharp enough to wound Fanny Medford. She looked rather pleadingly at the other woman’s clever, gentle face. “Always evil spirits?” she murmured. “Never good ones?” Mrs. Conway murmured back, and the two seemed for a moment to be isolated together. “Never good ones; and _never_ the real dead. That is forbidden, you know.” I had hoped that our moving from the dining room would break the current, but I had reckoned without Fenwick. We had our coffee all together in Allis’s big library--so much the nicest room in the house that I didn’t much wonder at Maud Allis’s refusing, except under great pressure, to drag the women away elsewhere. Nora Pate was sent upstairs to study, and we were freer. As soon as she had gone, Fenwick led us back to the subject. Mrs. Conway sat apart in the shadows, moving a fan slowly. Mrs. Medford fixed her eyes hungrily on Fenwick. The rest of us listened. After all, it was Fenwick’s party. “Of course you see all kinds of trances, and miracles, and levitation, and tricks, out in the East,” he began. “I confess I’m not much interested in what Hindus and such do. They’re so different, anyhow. But it does interest me to come back to America for the first time since the war, and find everybody going it this way. The Americans and English out there do it, too. But there’s an epidemic here, as far as I can make out. Look at your niece and her ouija-board. And all of us ready to argue about it. Honestly, I’m interested. I’m perfectly open-minded about it, myself. I’m not psychic, or whatever you call it.” “You don’t have to be ‘psychic.’ There’s no such thing.” This came out of the shadows where Mrs. Conway’s fan waved. Mrs. Medford turned and gazed at her, as if trying to penetrate even deeper shadows that lay between them. “Oh, well, I mean--I’ve sat in on table-tipping once or twice, but I don’t think I added much. I never saw any ghosts, or had anything queer happen to me. I know a man out in Singapore who does automatic writing, though--gets stuff through from his mother. At least, he says he doesn’t believe it’s his mother, but he keeps right on, all the same. He says she has told him things that no one else could have known about.” “_He_ knew about them, didn’t he?” asked Allis, with heavy matter-of-factness. “Why, yes--he and she.” “Well, it all came out of his subconscious.”