"So with you. You say to me, 'I have no heavenly visions in my life.' I answer: Do you expect them on Broadway or in your business office? You are on the dusty, weedy, noisy high-road, my friends, and you will never hear a spirit voice or catch the flutter of a hand till you retire to the dusk and the quiet. Enter the land of meditation. Manifest a willingness to meet the angel visitors half-way, and then the wings of the unseen will rustle about you, the cool and scented winds of the invisible universe will kiss your cheeks. Shadowy voices will be wafted from the dark. Song will break from the silences to comfort and heal you.
"We see only what we will to see--that is a known law of psychology. Electricity was a force in the world six thousand years before man really saw it. Now we hear it crackle in our hair and stir in our garments. By studying the conditions of its manifestation we are able to call it forth in giant power. So of these invisible ones--they are all about us, eager to bless, to prove their presence. They are here now. Around each one of you there are throngs hovering to manifest their love; they will do so, by the aid of this wonderful psychic who has consented to sit for us to-night. Let me repeat that she does this because the dead demand and the living beseech her to act as their intermediary." With abrupt, almost ludicrous change to a matter-of-fact tone, he added, "Henry, turn the light a little lower."
As the attendant glided to his task, Serviss was mightily moved to rise in his seat and cry out against the foolish, profaning business. They were putting the girl into the exact attitude of the paid trickster. At college he had attended a few of these séances, where vulgar and immoral women had furthered their trade; and to see Viola, whom he still believed to be essentially sweet, or at least reclaimable, thrown into this most dubious posture, disgusted and angered him. "But I am an uninvited guest. My rising would precipitate a scene, involving Viola," he reasoned, and so kept his seat, though his hands clinched and his teeth set with the effort at control.
Some one commenced to play softly upon a harp, and a little sigh like a breeze passed over the group. The women had begun to respond to the manager's emotional appeal. "I can feel them gathering," he called, softly, from his seat beside the motionless girl. "The spirit host are about us. I can almost hear the rustle of their wings."