"You compel belief, in a word, before you prove to us that we ought to believe," said a professor from a Baptist college in New Jersey, smiling blandly down upon him. "Scientifically—"
"I knows noting of scientifics. I knows dat my wife hash de power to ashist de souls to clode demselves wid matter. I don't pretend to explain where she got dat power, I don't know what ish dat power: I only know she hash it. If zhentlemans will submit to the conditions, they shall zhoodge for demselves."
"Now, the ignorance of this man impresses me favorably," said the professor to his friends. "He is evidently incapable of inventing a successful trick even of conjuring. If any great unknown force of Nature has chosen him or his wife as tools, we should not despise the manifestation because the tools are very gross matter. They are the steel wire charged with the lightning, perhaps."
Dr. Dehr came forward and touched the motionless woman, shaking his head solemnly: "She is highly charged with electricity now, sir. The air is vital, as I might say, with spiritual presences. I have no doubt, gentlemen, before we part, that we shall see one of the most remarkable phenomena of the nineteenth century."
"How well she poses!" whispered Miss Fleming to the judge. "But the stage-properties are bad: the velvet is cotton, and the gold brass-gilt."
"Now, to me," said the judge emphatically, "there is a dreadful reality, a dead look, in her face. What Poe would have made of this scene! There was a man who could grapple with these supreme mysteries! No! that woman undoubtedly has learned the secret of life and of death. She can afford to be passive." The judge's very whisper was judicial, though pulpy.
It was not possible that the woman should have heard them, yet a moment after she lifted her eyes and motioned slowly toward them.
"God bless my soul, ma'am! You don't want me!" cried the judge.
Waring half rose, laughing, but with cold chills down his backbone, and then dropped into his seat, relieved: "You are the chosen victim, Miss Fleming."
Cornelia went up to the medium. She was confident the whole affair was a vulgar trick, but there was a stricture at her heart as if an iron hand had been laid upon it. The energy went out of her step, the blood from her face.