“There you are!” said she. “One can never have a beautiful dream, or try to do anything sensible—because of the newspaper reporters!”
If Montague had been meeting Mrs. Winnie Duval for the first time, he would have been impressed by her yearnings for the simple life; he would have thought it an important sign of the times. But alas, he knew by this time that his charming hostess had more flummery about her than anybody else he had encountered—and all of her own devising! Mrs. Winnie smoked her own private brand of cigarettes, and when she offered them to you, there were the arms of the old ducal house of Montmorenci on the wrappers! And when you got a letter from Mrs. Winnie, you observed a three-cent stamp upon the envelope—for lavender was her colour, and two-cent stamps were an atrocious red! So one might feel certain that it Mrs. Winnie ever went in for chicken-raising, the chickens would be especially imported from China or Patagonia, and the chicken-coops would be precise replicas of those in the old Chateau de Montmorenci which she had visited in her automobile.
But Mrs. Winnie was beautiful, and quite entertaining to talk to, and so he was respectfully sympathetic while she told him about her pastoral intentions. And then she told him about Mrs. Caroline Smythe, who had called a meeting of her friends at one of the big hotels, and organized a society and founded the “Bide-a-Wee Home” for destitute cats. After that she switched off into psychic research—somebody had taken her to a seance, where grave college professors and ladies in spectacles sat round and waited for ghosts to materialize. It was Mrs. Winnie’s first experience at this, and she was as excited as a child who has just found the key to the jam-closet. “I hardly knew whether to laugh or to be afraid,” she said. “What would you think?”
“You may have the pleasure of giving me my first impressions of it,” said Montague, with a laugh.
“Well,” said she, “they had table-tipping—and it was the most uncanny thing to see the table go jumping about the room! And then there were raps—and one can’t imagine how strange it was to see people who really believed they were getting messages from ghosts. It positively made my flesh creep. And then this woman—Madame Somebody-or-other—went into a trance—ugh! Afterward I talked with one of the men, and he told me about how his father had appeared to him in the night and told him he had just been drowned at sea. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
“We have such a tradition in our family,” said he.
“Every family seems to have,” said Mrs. Winnie. “But, dear me, it made me so uncomfortable—I lay awake all night expecting to see my own father. He had the asthma, you know; and I kept fancying I heard him breathing.”
They had risen and were strolling into the conservatory; and she glanced at the man in armour. “I got to fancying that his ghost might come to see me,” she said. “I don’t think I shall attend any more séances. My husband was told that I promised them some money, and he was furious—he’s afraid it’ll get into the papers.” And Montague shook with inward laughter, picturing what a time the aristocratic and stately old banker must have, trying to keep his wife out of the papers!
Mrs. Winnie turned on the lights in the fountain, and sat by the edge, gazing at her fish. Montague was half expecting her to inquire whether he thought that they had ghosts; but she spared him this, going off on another line.
“I asked Dr. Parry about it,” she said. “Have you met him?”