“You’d better give me her name and address and I’ll see that she is properly dealt with.”
“I’d rather not.”
Horace Williams shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you’d better get up and come down to supper, hadn’t you? There’s no reason for lying in bed if you’re not ill.”
“All right,” Elsie agreed sullenly.
Her husband never shouted at her or threatened her, but she was afraid of him, and of a certain sinister dryness that characterised his manner when he was displeased.
The dryness was there now.
Elsie spent the evening downstairs. Her husband read the newspaper, and she turned over the pages of a fashion magazine listlessly. Her thoughts, unwillingly enough, returned again and again to the scene in the clairvoyante’s room, but still she could not remember the actual words screamed out by Madame Clara before she had lost consciousness. But she remembered quite well other words, that had preceded them.
“You are magnetic ... extraordinarily magnetic.... You are not awake—your mind is asleep.... Now, you are bored, satiated. You are ceaselessly craving for a new emotion....”
Elsie reflected how true this was.
She glanced distastefully at her elderly husband.