round ankles and little feet." Then he
unexpectedly made a very profound remark: "I think pale girls are more
disturbing than red cheeks. They've always been for me, anyway. Ena was
the most disturbing thing in the world."

Here, where I might have been expected to lose my patience disastrously,
a flicker of interest appeared in McGeorge and his connection with the
Meekers. A normal, sentimental recital would, of course, be
insupportable; but McGeorge, I realized, lacked the cooerdination of
instincts and faculties which constitutes the healthy state he had
called, by implication, stupid. The abnormal often permits extraordinary
glimpses of the human machine, ordinarily a sealed and impenetrable
mystery. Hysteria has illuminated many of the deep emotions and
incentives, and McGeorge, sitting lost in a quivering inner delight, had
the significant symptoms of that disturbance.

He may, I thought, exhibit some of the primitive "complex sensitiveness"
of old taboos, and furnish an illustration, for a commentary on the
sacred Kings, of the physical base of religious fervor.

"An ordinary prospective mother-in-law," said McGeorge, "is hard enough,
but Mrs. Meeker----" He made a motion descriptive of his state of mind
in the Decker parlor. "Eyes like ice," he continued; "and I could see
that I hadn't knocked her over with admiration. Ena got mad soon, and
made faces at her mother when she wasn't looking, just as if she were a
common girl. It touched me tremendously. Then--I had looked down at the
carpet for a moment--Mrs. Meeker had gone, without a sound, in a flash.
It was a good eight feet to the door and around a table. Space and time
are nothing to her."

Silence again enveloped him; he might have been thinking of the
spiritistic triumphs of Mrs. Meeker or of Ena with her sweet curves.
Whatever might be said of the latter, it was clear that she was no
prude. McGeorge drew a deep breath; it was the only expression of his
immediate preoccupation.

"It was quite a strain," he admitted presently. "I called as often as
possible and a little oftener. The reception, except for dear Ena, was
not prodigal. Once they were having a sitting, and I went back to the
kitchen. Of course Lizzie Tuoey, their former servant, was no more, and
they had an ashy-black African woman. Some one was sobbing in the front
room--the terrible sobs of a suffocating grief. There was a voice, too,
a man's, but muffled, so that I couldn't make out any