He rose to the defense of his hero. "Boyden will never be an old fogy. He's the most up-to-date man in America. He really is the only experimentalist along these lines. He's out for the facts." "Your mother's Voices say he is as blind as the rest, wilfully blind." "Do you really hold stock in my mother's Voices?" She gazed upon him in large-eyed wonder. "Yes, don't you?" "No. How can they be anything but a delusion?" "I don't know. I only know they are profoundly mysterious and that they tell me things which convince me. They seem to know my most secret thought. I have been _forced_ to believe in them. My aunt's fortune has been doubled and my own income greatly augmented by their advice." He took this up. "Tell me more about that. What did they advise you to do?" "They advised buying certain stocks in a machine for making paper boxes and recommended the Universal Traction Company." At this moment Mrs. Wood, senior, plucked at his sleeve. "Louise tells me you're the son of our dear medium, Lucy Ollnee." "I am, yes," he replied, rather ungraciously, for he was eager to revert to Leo. "Perhaps you're a medium yourself," the old lady pursued. "Thank the Lord, no! I haven't the ghost of a Voice about me." She chuckled. "At your age one thinks only of love and dollars. When you are as old as I am the next world will interest you a great deal more than it does now. Besides, you must believe in spirits after they have made you rich. They've made Louise and Leo rich--I suppose you know that?" He soon turned back to Leo. "I wish people would not talk my mother's Voices to me. I hear nothing else now." "It's your mother's 'atmosphere.' No one thinks of anything else when in her presence." "Don't you see how intolerable all that is going to be for me?" he asked, with bitter gravity. "I can see that she isn't exactly human even to you. She's just a sort of a freak. No one loves her or seeks her for herself alone, only for what she can do. That's another reason why I must insist on her getting away from this. I will not have her treated like a wireless telephone." Her eyes expressed more sympathy than she put into her voice. "I see what you mean; but, believe me, I had not thought of her in just that light, and I think you're quite wrong about my aunt. She is really very fond of your mother." He was eager to know more of what this clear-sighted girl had seen, but her neighbor, Mr. Carew, claimed her, and he was forced back upon Grandmother Wood, who talked of her new faith to him for nearly half an hour.