ouse."

II

A PRESENTIMENT

Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our
several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations
and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one
professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with
the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little
in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual
gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that
Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind
action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too
heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite
blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in
occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver.
He liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the
invincible persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in
these themes by the law of his science, though he had been assured
again and again that in spite of its misleading name psychology did
not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver's
eyes lighted up with a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one
night, after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this,
now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from
something before:

"Wasn't there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or
fifty years ago than there is now?"

Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his
chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward
Rulledge. "What made you think of that?" he asked.

"I don't know. Why?"

"Because I was thinking of it myself." He glanced at me, and I shook
my head.

"Well," Minver said, "if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I'll own
that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no
reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a
thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had
the notion that presentiments ran in the family."

"Why had you that notion?" Rulledge demanded.

"I don't know that I proposed telling," the painter said, giving
himself to his pipe.

"Perhaps you didn't have it," Rulledge retaliated.

"Perhaps," Minver assented.

Wanhope turned from the personal aspec