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The older woman's face was all aglow. "Oh, my dear; I've had such a wonderful message from your dear mother. Last night " Sylvia recoiled from the mad old creature. She could not bear to have her sane, calm, strong mother's name on those lips. Cousin Parnelia went on, full of confidence: "I was sound asleep last night when I was awakened by the clock's striking two.
Anyway, he was 'teaching' other mediums for a big price. And it came out that Cousin Parnelia had mortgaged the house for more than it was worth, and had used the money to take those 'lessons. I couldn't believe it for a minute. When I really understood what she'd done, I was so angry I felt like smashing both fists down on the piano keys and howling!
Several lines were written and then the pencil stopped abruptly. Sylvia standing near her father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that the veins on his temples were swollen. Cousin Parnelia took her hand off planchette, put on her spectacles, read over what had been written, and gave it to Professor Marshall.
I thought of my blue corduroy I'd given up I was only fourteen and just crazy about clothes. Mother was sitting on the floor, scraping away at the table-leg. She got up, laid down her sandpaper, and asked Cousin Parnelia if she'd excuse us for a few minutes. Then she took me by the hand, as though I was a little girl.
He was not looking at her, but at Cousin Parnelia, who now sprang forward, crying that she had had a beautiful, beautiful message from Cousin Barbara. "It came last night at two o'clock ... just after the clock struck two " Professor Marshall looked quickly at his daughter, and she saw that he too had heard the clock striking in the dreadful night, and that he noted the coincidence.
Between the two extremes represented by shabby, crack-brained Cousin Parnelia and elegant, sardonic old Professor Kennedy, there were many other habitual visitors at the house raw, earnest, graceless students of both sexes, touchingly grateful for the home atmosphere they were allowed to enter; a bushy-haired Single-tax fanatic named Hecht, who worked in the iron-foundries by day, and wrote political pamphlets by night; Miss Lindström, the elderly Swedish woman laboring among the poor negroes of Flytown; a constant sprinkling from the Scandinavian-Americans whose well-kept truck-farms filled the region near the Marshall home; one-armed Mr.
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.
"Read it read it it is too beautiful!" quivered the other, "and then let me show it to your father. It was meant for him " Sylvia shook like a roughly plucked fiddle-string. She seized the wrinkled old hand fiercely. "Cousin Parnelia, I forbid you going anywhere near my father! You know as well as I do how intensely he has always detested spiritualism. To see you might be the thing that would "
You just ought to hear what she makes of negro dialect! And I know all the socialist arguments from hearing a socialist editor get them off every Sunday afternoon. And I even know how to manage planchette and write mediumistically save the mark! from Cousin Parnelia, a crazy old cousin of Mother's who hangs round the house more or less."
But he was so little that he only had thirty cents or something like that in a tin bank, so it didn't matter. When we put it all together it wasn't nearly enough of course, and we took the rest out of our own little family savings-bank rainy-day savings and bought the tiny house and lot. Father wanted to 'surprise' Cousin Parnelia with the deed.
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