request we stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I
remember, took a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance,
and crunched it in his teeth. Then Miss Jeremy came in.

She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say,
and in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal
young woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much
personality, perhaps; the very word "medium" precludes that. A
"sensitive," I think she called herself. We were presented to her,
and but for the stripped and bare room, it might have been any
evening after any dinner, with bridge waiting.

When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. "What a
strange day it has been!" she said. "I have been very nervous. I
only hope I can do what you want this evening."

"I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy," I replied.

She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had
never thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at
once. We all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the
iconoclast, the antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously
intent eyes.

Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the
drawing-room doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs.
Dane's empty wheeled chair across them.

"Anything that comes in," he boasted, "will come through the keyhole
or down the chimney."