Madam Spoll fingered it and weighed it reflectively.
"I get a condition of what you might call inharmony. Seems to me like in your home something is worrying you and you ain't satisfied, you understand, with the way things are going and sometimes you feel as if, well, you just couldn't stand it!" Her smile, now, bathed her dupe with sympathy.
The lady nodded vigorously, with tightly shut lips.
"You kind of wonder if it does any good for you to go to all the trouble you do to sacrifice yourself and try to do your duty, when it ain't what you might call appreciated. And you're worried about money, too. Ain't that so?"
She received a ready assent. The woman's eyes were fixed upon her. Every one in the room watched the stripping naked of a soul.
"Well, John says that your father and him are helping you all they can on the spirit plane, and he thinks conditions will be more favorable and will take a turn for the better by the first of the year."
A question fluttered on the woman's lips, but before it had time to escape, Madam Spoll suddenly turned in the other direction.
"While I was talking to that lady," she said, "I felt an influence leading me to that corner over there by the clock, and I get the initials 'S.F.B.' Is there anybody of that name over there?"
A flashily dressed woman, with tinted yellow hair and rhinestone ear-rings, raised her hand.
"Those are my initials," she announced.