impressed upon you are abnormal; and the abnormal disturbs you. Now
these apparitions did not seem abnormal. I saw nothing wonderful in
Mrs. Ventris's act. I was impressed by it, I was excited by it, as I
still am by a convulsion of nature--a thunder-storm in the Alps, for
instance, a water-spout at sea. Such things hold beauty and terror;
they entrance, they appal; but they never shock. They happen, and they
are right. I have not seen what people call a ghost, and I have often
been afraid lest I should see one. But I know very well that if ever I
did I should have no fear. I know very well that a natural fact
impresses its conformity with law upon you first and last. It becomes,
on the moment of its appearance, a part of the landscape. If it does
not, it is an hallucination, or a freak of the imagination, and will
shock you. I have much more extraordinary experiences than this to
relate, but there will be nothing shocking in these pages--at least
nothing which gave me the least sensation of shock. One of them--a
thing extraordinary to all--must occupy a chapter by itself. I cannot
precisely fit a date to it, though I shall try. And as it forms a
whole, having a beginning, a middle and an end, I shall want to
depart from my autobiographical plan and put it in as a whole. The
reader will please to recollect that it did not work itself out in my
consciousness by a flash. The first stages of it came so, in flashes
of revelation; but the conclusion was of some years later, when I was
older and more established in the world.

* * * * *

But before I embark upon it I should like to make a large jump forward
and finish with the young woman of Gaylord's Rents. It was by accident
that I happened upon her at her mysteries, at a later day when I was
living in London, in Camden Town.