“And it is to be noted that I started the whole affair. It began at my suggestion. I do not know what put it into my head, but I do know that it was me started the whole thing going.
“You know, after your departure our little band at the Petunia Boarding House was reduced to just six persons, not counting the young gentleman from Cambridge who was, as Miss Rewster says, a Bird of Passage. Naturally the six of us felt rather drawn together. There were the two Miss Solbés, both very intelligent young ladies, and there were Mr. Hockleby and Mrs. Hockleby, and Miss Hockleby, and there was me. We were drawn together at lunch after you had gone off—it was a little showery and we had a fire in the drawing-room and Miss Solbé, the one with the glasses, tried to show me one of her Patiences. We got into quite an interesting argument about whether it was possible to will which card would turn up next. I have always inclined to the view that for certain people, people with the necessary gift, it was possible to do so, but Mr. Hockleby showed himself extremely sceptical in the matter. He said that if there was a card on the top of the pack ready to turn up, and if one willed that a different card should turn up, then that meant that one had really by sheer will force to re-manufacture two of the cards in the pack, make them over again, each into the other, make them blank, reprint them and everything. But I tried to explain to him that this is not philosophically sound because of predestination. If you were predestined to will that such a card should be on the top of the pack, then that card was also predestined to be there. He argued——”
“But is it necessary to tell me all this, Daddy, before we get to your psychic experience?”
“It is just to illustrate the fact that Mr. Hockleby was an extremely sceptical person.”
“Was that young man from Cambridge present at the discussions?”
“No-oh. No. He was not. He had probably gone down to the Garage to see if his Spare Part had come. He was always going down to the Garage to see about his Spare Part.”
§ 2
Mr. Preemby h’rrmped and began a new section of his narrative.
“It was in the evening after dinner,” he said, “that things really began. I went into the smoking-room—to smoke—and afterwards I went into the drawing-room, and when I went into the drawing-room I had no more thought of occult phenomena, Christina Alberta, than I had of flying over the moon. But as I came into the drawing-room I saw Miss Solbé looking at her Patience cards which she had just put out, and the way she was holding her hands on the table reminded me of the way I had read that people put their hands together on the table when they were trying experiments in table-turning. And almost without thinking I said: ‘Why, Miss Solbé, the way you are holding your hands is just the way they do when they are going to do table-turning!’ I said it just like that.
“Mr. Hockleby was reading his paper at the time—the Times, I think, but it may have been the Morning Post—but he put it down when he heard me say that and he looked over his glasses at me and said, ‘You don’t believe in that sort of thing, Mr. Preemby, surely?’