er frowsy round. The stale air of foul lodgment was
upon her. I found out indeed this much about her ostensible state,
that she was the wife of a cab-driver whose name was Ventris. He was
an ill-conditioned, sottish fellow who treated her badly, but had
given her a child. But he was chiefly on night-work at Euston, and the
man whom I had seen familiar with her in the daytime was not he. Her
reputation among her neighbours was not good. She was, in fact, no
better than she should be--or, as I prefer to put it, no better than
she could be.

Yet I knew her, withal, as of the fairy-kind, bound to this
earth-bondage by some law of the Universe not yet explored; not
pitiable because not self-pitying, and (what is more important) not
reprehensible because impossible to be bound, as we are, soul to body.
I know that now, but did not know it then; and yet--extraordinary
thing--I was never shocked by the contrast between her two states of
being. This is to me a clear and certain evidence of their
reality--just as it is evidence to me that when, at ten years old, I
seemed to see the boy in the wood, I really did see him. An
hallucination or a dream upsets your moral balance. The things
impressed upon you are abnormal; and the abnormal disturbs you. Now
these apparitions did not seem abnormal. I saw nothing wonderful in
Mrs. Ventris's act. I was impressed by it, I was excited by it, as I
still am by a convulsion of nature--a thunder-storm in the Alps, for
instance, a water-spout at sea. Such things hold beauty and terror;
they entrance, they appal; but they never shock. They happen, and they
are right. I have not seen what people call a ghost, and I have often
been afraid lest I should see one. But I know very well that if ever I
did I should have no fear. I know very well that a natural fact
impresses its conformity with law upon you first and last. It becomes,
on the moment of its appearance, a part of the landscape. If it does
not, it is an hallucination, or a freak of the imagination, and will
shock you. I have much more extraordinary experiences than this to
relate, but there will be nothing shocking in these pages--at least
nothing which gave me the least sensation of shock. One of them--a
thing extraordinary to all--must occupy a chapter by itself. I cannot
precisely fit a date to it, though I shall try. And as it forms a
whole, having a beginning, a middle and an end, I shall want to
depart from my autobiographical plan an