say things like
that."

"They're true. You know they're true!" the girl passionately retorted.
"You all treat me as if I had no more soul than a telephone."

"That is very unjust," declared Mrs. Lambert. "This is only one of her
dark moods, doctor. You must not think she really means this."

The girl's brows were now set in sullen lines which seemed a
profanation of her fair young face. "But I _do_ mean it, and I want
Dr. Serviss to know just what is in my heart." Her voice choked with a
kind of helpless, rebellious anger as she went on: "I'm tired of my
life. I am sick of all these moaning people that crowd round me. It's
all unnatural to me. I want to touch young people, and have a share in
their life before I grow old. I want to know healthy people who don't
care anything about death or spirits. It's all a craze with people
anyway--something that comes after they lose a wife or child. They are
very nice to me then, but after a few weeks they despise me as the
dust under their feet--or else they make love to me and want to marry
me."

Mrs. Lambert rose. "I will not allow you to go on like this, Viola. I
don't understand you to-day. You'll give Dr. Serviss a dreadful
opinion of us all."

"I don't care," the girl recklessly replied, "I am going to be honest
with Dr. Serviss. I don't like what I do, and I don't intend to trust
my whole life to the spirits any longer. They may all be devils and
lying to us. I don't believe my own grandfather would be so cruel as
to push me into this public work."

Mrs. Lambert again warned Serviss from taking this outburst too
seriously. "She is possessed, doctor. Some bad spirit is influencing
her to say these things to you. She's not herself."

Viola seized on this admission. "That's just it. They've destroyed my
own mind so that I don't know my own thoughts. If there are good
spirits, there must be bad spirits--don't you think so, Dr. Serviss?"

His eyes did not waver now. His voice was very quiet, but very
decisive, as he replied: "My training, my habit of thinking, excludes
all belief in the return of the dead either as good spirits or bad,
but if there are spirits I should certainly think evil of them if they
were to force you into a service you abhor. I do not pretend to pass
judgment on your case--I know so little about it--but I do sympathize
with you. I deeply feel the injustice of these public tests, and I
will do all I can to prevent them."

Mrs. Lambert interrupte