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Sight Unseen by Mary Roberts Rinehart
page 25 of 146 (17%)
Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a
highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all,
a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did,
touching but intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?

I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the
darkened recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves
that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the
heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy
forms, invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their
obscurity when, by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged
on the extreme right or left of my field of vision.

I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved. The Wellses
had been among us but not of us, as I have said. They had come,
like gay young comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing
behind them their cars and servants, their children and governesses
and rather riotous friends, and had flashed on us in a sort of
bright impermanence.

Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the
surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his
gambling debts. But underneath it all there had always been
something boyishly honest about him. He had played, it is true,
through most of the thirty years that now marked his whole life,
but he could have been made a man by the right woman. And he had
married the wrong one.

Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found
that, as is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own
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