He took this up. "Tell me more about that. What did they advise you to do?"
"They advised buying certain stocks in a machine for making paper boxes and recommended the Universal Traction Company."
At this moment Mrs. Wood, senior, plucked at his sleeve. "Louise tells me you're the son of our dear medium, Lucy Ollnee."
"I am, yes," he replied, rather ungraciously, for he was eager to revert to Leo.
"Perhaps you're a medium yourself," the old lady pursued.
"Thank the Lord, no! I haven't the ghost of a Voice about me."
She chuckled. "At your age one thinks only of love and dollars. When you are as old as I am the next world will interest you a great deal more than it does now. Besides, you must believe in spirits after they have made you rich. They've made Louise and Leo rich—I suppose you know that?"
He soon turned back to Leo. "I wish people would not talk my mother's Voices to me. I hear nothing else now."
"It's your mother's 'atmosphere.' No one thinks of anything else when in her presence."
"Don't you see how intolerable all that is going to be for me?" he asked, with bitter gravity. "I can see that she isn't exactly human even to you. She's just a sort of a freak. No one loves her or seeks her for herself alone, only for what she can do. That's another reason why I must insist on her getting away from this. I will not have her treated like a wireless telephone."