g polite to our guests. Why don't you go out and
listen to Professor Falabella?"
"I can hear him perfectly well from here," Bill muttered--and indeed the
professor's mellifluous tones pervaded every nook and cranny of the
thin-walled house. "Long-winded cultist! What is he a professor of, I'd
like to know."
"Professor Falabella is _not_ a cultist!" affirmed Gloria angrily. "He's
a great philosopher."
Bill Hughes said something unprintable. "If I'd married Lucy Allison,"
he continued unkindly, "she'd never have filled the house with
long-haired cultists on my so-called day of rest."
Gloria's soft chin trembled, and her blue eyes filled with tears. She
was beginning to put on weight, he noticed. "I've been hearing nothing
but Lucy Allison, Lucy Allison, Lucy Allison for the past year. Y-you
said yourself she looked like a horse."
"Horses," he observed, "have sense."
He was being brutal, but he couldn't help it and didn't want to.
Professor Falabella was only the most long-winded of a long series of
mystics Gloria was forever dragging into the house. _The trouble with
the half-educated_, he thought bitterly, _is that they seek culture in
the most peculiar places_.
"I'll bet she would have let me have peace on Sunday," he said. "It just
goes to show what happens when you marry a woman solely for her looks."
He drained the bottle; then hurled it into the garbage pail with a
resounding crash.
Gloria's shoulders shook as she filled the kettle. "I wish I'd decided
to be an old maid," she sobbed.
A very unlikely possibility, he thought. Even now, shopworn as she was,
Gloria could have a fairly wide range of suitors should something happen
to him. She looked sexy, but how deceiving appearances could be!
Professor Falabella was still talking as Bill and Gloria emerged from
the kitchen. "I believe that it is possible for an individual who exists
on a limited plane of imagination to transpose from one plane to an
adjacent one without difficulty ... Great Heavens, what was that?"
Something had whisked past the archway leading into the foyer.
"Don't pay any attention," Gloria smiled nervously. "The house is
haunted."
"My dear," one of the ladies offered, "I know of the most marvelous
exterminator--"
"The house," Gloria assured her coldly, "really _is_ haunted. We've been
seeing things ever since we moved in."
And she really believed it, Bill thought. Believed that the house was
haunted, that is. Of c
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