"I should tell him that he was a fool or a liar, that is all.
It is impossible."

"Or that the same identity, spirit, animating principle--call
it what you will--can flit from body to body, say in successive
ages? Or that the dead can communicate with the living?"

"Convince me of any of these things, Arbuthnot, and mind you I
desire to be convinced, and I will take back every word I have
said and walk through Fulcombe in a white sheet proclaiming
myself the fool. Now, I must get off to the Cottage Hospital to
cut out Widow Jenkins's varicose veins. They are tangible and
real at any rate; about the largest I ever saw, indeed. Give up
dreams, old boy, and take to something useful. You might go back
to your fiction writing; you seem to have leanings that way, and
you know you need not publish the stories, except privately for
the edification of your friends."

With this Parthian shaft Bickley took his departure to make a
job of Widow Jenkins's legs.

I took his advice. During the next few months I did write
something which occupied my thoughts for a while, more or less.
It lies in my safe to this minute, for somehow I have never been
able to make up my mind to burn what cost me so much physical and
mental toil.

When it was finished my melancholy returned to me with added
force. Everything in the house took a tongue and cried to me of
past days. Its walls echoed a voice that I could never hear