adventure, and most of them funked it all the time. And so primed,
you know, he had come."

"But really!" said Wish to the fire.

"These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly.
"I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that
was the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and
down, with his thin voice going talking, talking about his wretched
self, and never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last.
He was thinner and sillier and more pointless than if he had been
real and alive. Only then, you know, he would not have been in my
bedroom here--if he HAD been alive. I should have kicked him out."

"Of course," said Evans, "there ARE poor mortals like that."

"And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest
of us," I admitted.

"What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that
he did seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had
made of haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told
it would be a 'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,'
and here it was, nothing but another failure added to his record!
He proclaimed himself an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and
I can quite believe it, that he had never tried to do anything all
his life that he hadn't made a perfect mess of--and through all
the wastes of eternity he never would. If he had had sympathy,
perhaps--. He paused at that, and stood regarding me. He remarked that,
strange as it might seem to me, nobody, not any one, ever, had given