s photograph in the evening paper of La Chance, and they
had added an acquaintance with the manners of newspaper reporters to
their already very heterogeneous experience with callers of every
variety; but of real anxiety the episode had brought them nothing.

As to that same extraordinary assortment of visitors at the Marshall
house, one of the University co-eds had said facetiously that you
met there every sort of person in the world, from spiritualists to
atheists--everybody except swells. The atheist of her dictum was the
distinguished and misanthropic old Professor Kennedy, head of
the Department of Mathematics, whose ample means and high social
connections with the leading family of La Chance made his misanthropy
a source of much chagrin to the faculty ladies, and who professed
for the Marshalls, for Mrs. Marshall in particular, a wrong-headed
admiration which was inexplicable to the wives of the other
professors. The faculty circle saw little to admire in the Marshalls.
The spiritualist of the co-ed's remark was, of course, poor foolish
Cousin Parnelia, the children's pet detestation, whose rusty clothes
and incoherent speech they were prevented from ridiculing only by
stern pressure from their mother. She always wore a black straw hat,
summer and winter, always carried a faded green shopping bag, with a
supply of yellow writing paper, and always had tucked under one arm
the curious, heart-shaped bit of wood, with the pencil attached, which
spiritualists call "planchette." The Marshall children thought this
the most laughable name imaginable, and were not always successful
in restraining the cruel giggles of childhood when she spoke of
planchette's writing such beautiful messages from her long-since-dead
husband and children. Although he had a dramatic sympathy for her
sorrow, Professor Marshall's greater vivacity of temperament made it
harder for him than for his wife to keep a straight face when Cousin
Parnelia proposed to be the medium whereby he might converse with
Milton or Homer. Indeed, his fatigued tolerance for her had been a
positive distaste ever since the day when he found her showing Sylvia,
aged ten, how to write with planchette. With an outbreak of temper,
for which he had afterwards apologized to his wife, he had forbidden
her ever to mention her damn unseemly nonsense to his children again.
He himself was a stout unbeliever in individual immortality, teaching
his children that the craving for it w