nd why should
it, Lizzie had commented, and all the blessed saints bursting their
throats with tunes! She swore, however, that she had had no part in the
ringing of the bells or the knocks and jumps the table took.

She had no explanation for the latter other than the conviction that the
dear God had little, if any, part in it. Rather her choice of an agent
inclined to the devil. Things happened, she affirmed, that tightened her
head like a kettle. The cries and groaning from the parlor during a
sitting would blast the soul of you. It was nothing at all for a
stranger to faint away cold. The light would then be turned up, and
water dashed on the unconscious face.

She insisted, McGeorge particularized, that the Meekers took no money
for their sittings. At times some grateful person would press a sum on
them; a woman had given two hundred and seventy dollars after a
conversation with her nephew, dead, as the world called it, twelve
years. All the Meekers worked but Jannie; she was spared every annoyance
possible, and lay in bed till noon. At the suggestion of Stepan, she
made the most unexpected demands. Stepan liked pink silk stockings. He
begged her to eat a candy called Turkish paste. He recommended a "teeny"
glass of Benedictine, a bottle of which was kept ready. He told her to
pinch her flesh black to show--Lizzie Tuoey forgot what.

Jannie was always dragged out with a face the color of wet laundry soap.
She had crying fits; at times her voice would change, and she'd speak a
gibberish that Mr. Meeker declared was Russian; and after a trance she
would eat for six. There was nothing about the senior Meeker Lizzie
could describe, but she disliked Mrs. Meeker intensely. She made the
preposterous statement that the woman could see through the blank walls
of the house. Ena was pale, but pretty, despite dark smudges under her
eyes; she sat up very late with boys or else sulked by herself. Albert
had a big grinning head on him, and ate flies. Lizzie had often seen him
at it. He spent hours against the panes of glass and outside the kitchen
door.

It wasn't what you could name gay at the Meekers, and, indeed, it hadn't
been necessary for the priest to insist on the girl finding another
place; she had decided that independently after she had been there less
than a month. Then Mrs. Kraemer had died during a sitting. She would be
off, she told McGeorge, the first of the week.

The latter, whose interest at the beginning h