"I can't speak if I look at you," she said, "and I must before you go further—I must tell you all about myself so that you will understand."
The confidence, long sought, was coming, he thought; and he thought also how little he cared for it now that he was pursuing a greater thing.
"You know so little about me that I must begin far back—you don't even know about my aunt—"
"I know something—what you've said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain House told me. She's Mrs. Paula Markham—" his mind went on, "the great fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said after a pause, "the great medium."
"I don't like to hear her called that," said Annette. "In spite of what I'm going to tell you, I never saw but once the thing they call a medium. That was years ago—but the horrible sacrilege of it has never left me. She had a part of truth, and she was desecrating it by guesses and catch words—selling it for money! Aunt Paula is broader than I. 'It's part of the truth,' she said, 'that woman is desecrating the work, but she's serving in her way.' I suppose so—but since then I've never liked to hear Aunt Paula called a medium."
She paused a second on this.
"If I were only sure of your sympathy!" A note of pleading fluttered in her voice.
"No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my sympathy—because it's yours," he answered.
As though she had not heard, she went on.
"I was an orphan. I never knew my father and mother. The first things I remember are of the country—perhaps that is why I love the out-of-doors—the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy, ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one morning—daisy-fields like snow—and the darling peep-peep-peep of little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and never succeeding. I couldn't say chicken. I always said shicken" She paused. With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her own little girlhood, she smiled.