The druggist’s account was settled, and though, when Sylvia first heard him, he had been doubtful if his medicine was doing the patient any good, he was now most anxious that he should continue with the prescription. That afternoon one of the doctors in residence at the Plutonian visited Arthur and at once advised his removal thither.
Arthur made rapid progress when he was once out of the hospitable squalor of the Auburn Hotel, and the story of Sylvia’s discovery of her unfortunate cousin became a romantic episode for all the guests of the Plutonian, a never-failing aid to conversation between wives waiting for their husbands to emerge from their daily torture at the hands of the masseurs, who lived like imps in the sulphurous glooms of the bath below; maybe it even provided the victims themselves with a sufficiently absorbing topic to mitigate the penalties of their cure.
Arthur himself expanded wonderfully as the subject of so much discussion. It gave Sylvia the greatest pleasure to see the way in which his complexion was recovering its old ruddiness and his steps their former vigor; but she did not approve of the way in which the story kept pace with Arthur’s expansion. She confided to him how very personally the news of the sick Englishman had affected her and how she had made up her mind from the beginning that it was a stranded actor, and afterward, when she heard in the drug-store the name Madden, that it actually was Arthur himself. He, however, was unable to stay content with such an incomplete telepathy; indulging human nature’s preference for what is not true, both in his own capacity as a liar and in his listeners’ avid and wanton credulity, he transferred a woman’s intimate hopes into a quack’s tale.
“Then you didn’t see your cousin’s spirit go up in the elevator when you were standing in the lobby? Now isn’t that perfectly discouraging?” complained a lady with an astral reputation in Illinois.
“I’m afraid the story’s been added to a good deal,” Sylvia said. “I’m sorry to disappoint the faithful.”
“She’s shy about giving us her experiences,” said another lady from Iowa. “I know I was just thrilled when I heard it. It seemed to me the most wonderful story I’d ever imagined. I guess you felt kind of queer when you saw him lying on a bed in your room.”
“He was in his own room,” Sylvia corrected, “and I didn’t feel at all queer. It was he who felt queer.”
“Isn’t she secretive?” exclaimed the lady from Illinois. “Why, I was going to ask you to write it up in our society’s magazine, The Flash. We don’t print any stories that aren’t established as true. Well, your experience has given me real courage, Miss Scarlett. Thank you.”
The astral enthusiast clasped Sylvia’s hand and gazed at her as earnestly as if she had noticed a smut on her nose.
“Yes, I’m sure we ought to be grateful,” said the lady from Iowa. “My! Our footsteps are treading in the unseen every day of our lives! You certainly are privileged,” she added, wrapping Sylvia in a damp mist of benign fatuity.