cquaintance with its rapidly growing literature; little more;
and until now I had had no striking psychical experiences of my own, and
had never, as it happened, attended a seance of any kind, either popular
or scientific. Nevertheless, I could--to put it so--speak that language.
I was familiar with the described phenomena, in a general way, and with
the conflicting theories of its leading investigators; but I
had--honestly speaking--no pet theories of my own, though always
impatient of spiritistic explanations, and rather inclined to doubt,
too, the persistent claim that thought transference had been
incontrovertibly established. On the whole, I suppose I was inclined to
favor common-sense mechanistic explanations of such phenomena, and to
regard all others with alert suspicion or wearily amused contempt.

Now at last, in my life's most urgent crisis, I had had news from
nowhere; now, furthermore, the being I loved and would protect, _must_
protect, had been thrown by psychic shock into that grim borderland, the
Abnormal: that land of lost voices, of the fringe of consciousness, of
dissociated personalities, of morbid obsession, and wild symbolic
dreams. Following on Conlon's heels, then, I entered a softly illumined
room--a restrained _Louis Seize_ room--a true Gertrude room, with its
cool French-gray panelled walls; but entered there as into sinister
darkness, as if groping for light. The comfortably accustomed, the
predictable, I felt, lay all behind me; I must step warily henceforth
among shifting shadows and phosphoric blurs. The issues were too
terrifying, too vast, for even one little false move; Susan's future,
the very health of her soul, might depend now upon the blundering
clumsiness or the instinctive tact with which I attempted to pick and
choose my way. It was with a secret shuddering of flesh and spirit that
I entered that discreet, faultless room.

Susan was lying on the low single French bed, a coverlet drawn over her;
they had removed her trim tailored hat, the jacket of her dark suit, and
her walking-boots, leaving them on the couch by the silk-curtained
windows, where they had perhaps first placed her. She had not dressed
for the evening before coming up to Gertrude's; it was evidently to have
been a businesslike call. Her black weblike hair--smoky, I always called
it, to tease her; it never fell lank or separated into strings--had been
disordered, and a floating weft of it had drifted across her fo