“Hullo!” cried Tarleton. “We’ve got hold of something at last that Miss Clive does believe in.”
“To a certain extent, yes.”
“I remember going to a séance once,” said Mrs Tarleton. “There was a dreadful woman going into trances, and pointing out people’s dead relations standing behind their chairs. She described them, and all sorts of things. It made me feel quite creepy.”
“Yes, but how many times was she wide of the mark for every time she made a good shot?” said Raynier.
“Hardly once. It is quite wonderful.”
“There’s nothing in that sort of clairvoyance; it’s sheer quackery,” said Hilda, speaking in a decisive, authoritative tone that astonished her hearers.
“I should think so,” said Raynier. “Whatever may be the state or locality of the dead, it is not to be supposed that they would be empowered, or would even wish, to appear in London, to enable a cad in a second-hand dress-suit to take up so much a head in gate money, nor a female fraud either, for the matter of that.”
“Well, but I don’t see why they shouldn’t,” cut in Tarleton, characteristically.
“No! It doesn’t strike you as improbable?” said Hilda, with a pitying look.
“Why should they be quacks?” persisted Tarleton. “Why shouldn’t there be anything in what they do?”