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The Bent Twig by Dorothy Canfield
page 22 of 564 (03%)
summer and winter, always carried a faded green shopping bag, with a
supply of yellow writing paper, and always had tucked under one arm
the curious, heart-shaped bit of wood, with the pencil attached, which
spiritualists call "planchette." The Marshall children thought this
the most laughable name imaginable, and were not always successful
in restraining the cruel giggles of childhood when she spoke of
planchette's writing such beautiful messages from her long-since-dead
husband and children. Although he had a dramatic sympathy for her
sorrow, Professor Marshall's greater vivacity of temperament made it
harder for him than for his wife to keep a straight face when Cousin
Parnelia proposed to be the medium whereby he might converse with
Milton or Homer. Indeed, his fatigued tolerance for her had been a
positive distaste ever since the day when he found her showing Sylvia,
aged ten, how to write with planchette. With an outbreak of temper,
for which he had afterwards apologized to his wife, he had forbidden
her ever to mention her damn unseemly nonsense to his children again.
He himself was a stout unbeliever in individual immortality, teaching
his children that the craving for it was one of the egotistic impulses
of the unregenerate human heart.

Between the two extremes represented by shabby, crack-brained Cousin
Parnelia and elegant, sardonic old Professor Kennedy, there were many
other habitual visitors at the house--raw, earnest, graceless students
of both sexes, touchingly grateful for the home atmosphere they were
allowed to enter; a bushy-haired Single-tax fanatic named Hecht, who
worked in the iron-foundries by day, and wrote political pamphlets by
night; Miss Lindström, the elderly Swedish woman laboring among
the poor negroes of Flytown; a constant sprinkling from the
Scandinavian-Americans whose well-kept truck-farms filled the region
near the Marshall home; one-armed Mr. Howell, the editor of a luridly
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