She began to cut her peach, but paused above a lifted bit to ask, with a renewal of animation in her expressive eyes:  “By the way, had you heard that Howland Wade has been gradually getting farther and farther away from Pellerinism?  It seems he’s begun to feel that there’s a Positivist element in it which is narrowing to any one who has gone at all deeply into the Wisdom of the East.  He was intensely interesting about it the other day, and of course I do see what he feels. ...  Oh, it’s too long to tell you now; but if you could manage to come in to tea some afternoon soon—­any day but Wednesday—­I should so like to explain—­”

THE EYES

I

WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s—­the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand being, after Murchard’s brilliant opening, the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a contribution.  There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfil the condition imposed.  It surprised us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham—­whose story was the slightest of the lot—­had the habit of sending our souls into the invisible.  So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be proud of our seven “exhibits,” and none of us would have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.

Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his arm-chair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his guests.  By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics.  But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a “turn.”

Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his character than my mother’s assertion that he had once been “a charming little man with nice eyes” corresponded to any possible reconstitution of his dry thwarted physiognomy.