“And you don’t believe that?” he asked, quietly.
“How can I?” Vera said. “I was brought up with them.” She shook her head and smiled. “I used to play around the kitchen stove with Pocahontas and Alexander the Great, and Martin Luther lived in our china closet. You see, the neighbors wouldn’t let their children come to our house; so, the only playmates I had were—ghosts.” She laughed wistfully. “My!” she exclaimed, “I was a queer, lonely little rat. I used to hear voices and see visions. I do still,” she added. With her elbows on the arms of her chair, she clasped her hands under her chin and leaned forward. She turned her eyes to Winthrop and nodded confidentially.
“Do you know,” she said, “sometimes I think people from the other world do speak to me.”
“But you said,” Winthrop objected, “you didn’t believe.”
“I know,” returned Vera. “I can’t!” Her voice was perplexed, impatient. “Why, I can sit in this chair,” she declared earnestly, “and fill this room with spirit voices and rappings, and you sitting right there can’t see how I do it. And yet, in spite of all the tricks, sometimes I believe there’s something in it.”
She looked at Winthrop, her eyes open with inquiry. He shook his head.
“Yes,” insisted the girl. “When these women come to me for advice, I don’t invent what I say to them. It’s as though something told me what to say. I have never met them before, but as soon as I pass into the trance state I seem to know all their troubles. And I seem to be half in this world and half in another world—carrying messages between them. Maybe,” her voice had sunk to almost a whisper; she continued as though speaking to herself, “I only think that. I don’t know. I wonder.”
There was a long pause.
“I wish,” began Winthrop earnestly, “I wish you were younger, or I were older.”
“Why?” asked Vera.