Galusha blushed. “Eh?” he queried. “Oh—oh, no, no. Quite so, really. Eh? Ah—yes.”
Cabot chuckled. “That's a comprehensive answer, at any rate,” he observed. “Come now, be my Who's-Who. For example, what is the name of the female under the hat like a—a steamer basket?”
Galusha looked. “That is Miss Hoag, the—ah—medium,” he said.
“Oh, I see. Did the spirits build that hat for her?”
Miss Hoag's headgear was intrinsically the same she had worn at the former seance, although the arrangement of the fruit, flowers, sprays and other accessories was a trifle different. The red cherries, for example, no longer bobbed at the peak of the roof; they now hung jauntily from the rear eaves, so to speak. The purple grapes had also moved and peeped coyly from a thicket of moth-eaten rosebuds. The wearer of this revamped millinery triumph seemed a bit nervous, even anxious, so it seemed to Martha Phipps, who, like Cabot and Galusha, was looking at her. Marietta kept hitching in her seat, pulling at her gown, and glancing from time to time at the gloomy countenance of Captain Jethro, who, Miss Phipps also noticed, was regarding her steadily and slowly pulling at his beard. This regard seemed to add to Miss Hoag's uneasiness.
The majority of those present were staring at the senior partner of Cabot, Bancroft and Cabot. The object of the attention could not help becoming aware of it.
“What are they all looking at me for?” he demanded, under his breath.
Galusha did not hear the question, but Primmie did, and answered it.
“They don't know who you be,” she whispered.
“What of it? I don't know who they are, either.”