“I’m going to tell you something, Willie,” I said.  “I am afraid of the telephone.”

He was completely incredulous.  I felt rather ridiculous, standing there in the sunlight of that summer Sabbath and making my confession.  But I did it.

“I am afraid of it,” I repeated.  “I’m desperately sure you will never understand.  Because I don’t.  I can hardly force myself to go to it.  I hate the very back corner of the hall where it stands, I—­”

I saw his expression then, and I stopped, furious with myself.  Why had I said it?  But more important still, why did I feel it?  I had not put it into words before, I had not expected to say it then.  But the moment I said it I knew it was true.  I had developed an idee fixe.

“I have to go downstairs at night and answer it,” I added, rather feebly.  “It’s on my nerves, I think.”

“I should think it is,” he said, with a note of wonder in his voice.  “It doesn’t sound like you.  A telephone!” But just at the church door he stopped me, a hand on my arm.

“Look here,” he said, “don’t you suppose it’s because you’re so dependent on the telephone?  You know that if anything goes wrong with it, you’re cut off, in a way.  And there’s another point—­you get all your news over it, good and bad.”  He had difficulty, I think, in finding the words he wanted.  “It’s—­it’s vital,” he said.  “So you attach too much importance to it, and it gets to be an obsession.”

“Very likely,” I assented.  “The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow.”

But—­was it idiotic?

I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time, not in the light of subsequent events.  For, if this narrative has any interest at all, it is a psychological one.  I have said that it is a study in fear, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is a study of the mental reaction of crime, of its effects on different minds, more or less remotely connected with it.

That my analysis of my impressions in the church that morning are not colored by subsequent events is proved by the fact that under cover of that date, July 16th, I made the following entry: 

“Why do Maggie and Miss Benton distrust each other?”

I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as is evidenced by the fact that I follow it with a recipe for fruit gelatin, copied from the newspaper.

It was a calm and sunny Sunday morning.  The church windows were wide open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling.  At the end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton—­the name came like an echo from the forgotten past—­sent a shower of colored light over Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues, and threw a sort of summer radiance over Miss Emily herself, in the seat ahead.

She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile.  She was so orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collar was so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you can understand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me to pulling myself straight.  I am rather casual as to seams.