"It began to look hopeless," he confessed of his passion. "Ena admitted that she liked me better than Wallace, but the family wouldn't hear of it. Once, when Mr. Meeker came to the door, he shut it in my face. The sittings kept going right along, and the manifestations were wonderful; the connection between Jannie and Stepan, her spirit control, grew closer and closer. There was a scientific investigation—some professors put Jannie on a weighing-machine during a séance and found that, in a levitation, she had an increase in weight virtually equal to the lifted table. They got phonograph records of the rapping——"
"Did you hear them?" I interrupted.
"They are still in the laboratory," he asserted defiantly, "But I have a photograph that was taken of an apparition." He fumbled in an inner pocket and produced the latter. The print was dark and obscured, but among the shadows a lighter shape was traceable: it might have been a woman in loose, white drapery, a curtain, light-struck; anything, in fact. I returned it to him impatiently.
"That," he informed me, "was a Christian martyr of ancient times."
"Burned to a cinder," I asked, "or dismembered by lions?"
"Can't you even for a minute throw off the illusion of the flesh?"
"Can you?"
He half rose in a flare of anger; for my question, in view of his admissions, had been sharply pressed.
"All love is a sanctification," McGeorge said, recovering his temper admirably. "The union of my beloved wife and me is a holy pact of spirits, transcending corruption."
"You married her against considerable opposition," I reminded him.