Questionable Shapes. William Dean Howells

with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew a long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss Hernshaw. “Ah, I see you did! Wasn’t it tremendous? I think the girl who did Regina was simply awful, don’t you?”

      “I don’t know,” said Hewson, still so trammeled in his own involuntary associations with the word as not fully to realize the strangeness of discussing “Ghosts” with a young lady. But he pulled himself together, and nimbly making his reflection that the latitude of the stage gave room for the meeting of cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise tabooed, if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. “I think that the greatest miracle of the play--and to me it was altogether miraculous"--

      “Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that!” cried the girl. “It was the greatest experience of my life. I can’t bear to have people undervalue it. I want to hit them. But go on!”

      Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of her potential violence: he pictured Miss Hernshaw beating down the inadequate witnesses of “Ghosts” with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her cobwebby handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long limp gloves looking curiously like her pretty young arms in their slenderness. “I was merely going to say that the most prodigious effect of the play was among the actors--I won’t venture on the spectators--”

      “No, don’t! It isn’t speakable.”

      “It’s astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen’s has with the actors. They can’t play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with themselves. They have to be, and not just _seem_.”

      Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. “I’m glad you think that,” she said, and Hewson felt very glad too that he thought that.

      “Why?” he asked.

      “Why? Because that is what I always want to do; and it’s what I always shall do, I don’t care what they say.”

      “But I don’t know whether I understand exactly.”

      “Deal squarely with everybody. Say what I really feel. Then they say what they really feel.”

      There was an obscure resentment unworthily struggling at the bottom of Hewson’s heart for her long neglect of him in behalf of the man on her left. “Yes,” he said, “if they are capable of really feeling anything.”

      “What do you mean? Everybody really feels.”

      “Well, then, thinking anything.”

      She drew herself up a little with an air of question. “I believe everybody really thinks, too, and it’s your duty to let them find out what they’re thinking, by truly saying what you think.”

      “Then _she_ isn’t dealing quite honestly with him,” said Hewson, with a malicious smile.

      The man at Miss Hernshaw’s left was still talking about the play, and he was at that moment getting off a piece of pure parrotry about it to the lady across the table: just what everybody had been saying about it from the first.

      “No, I should think she was not,” said the girl, gravely. She looked hurt, as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate, and Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had had his revenge in making her realize the man’s vacuity.

      He tried to get her back to talk about “Ghosts,” again, but she answered with indifference, and just then he was arrested by something a man was saying near the head of the table.

      VII.

      It was rather a large dinner, but not so large that a striking phrase, launched in a momentary lull, could not fuse all the wandering attentions in a sole regard. The man who spoke was the psychologist Wanhope, and he was saying with a melancholy that mocked itself a little in his smile: “I shouldn’t be particular about seeing a ghost myself. I have seen plenty of men who had seen men who had seen ghosts; but I never yet saw a man who had seen a ghost. If I had it would go a long way to persuade me of ghosts.”

      Hewson felt his heart thump in his throat. There was a pause, and it was as if all eyes but the eyes of the psychologist turned upon him; these rested upon the ice which the servant had just then silently slipped under them. Hewson had no reason to think that any of the people present were acquainted with his experience, but he thought it safest to take them upon the supposition that they had, and after he had said to the psychologist, “Will you allow me to present him to you?” he added, “I’m afraid every one else knows him too well already.”

      “You!” said his _vis-à-vis_, arching her eyebrows; and others up and down the table, looked round or over at Hewson where he sat midway of it with Miss Hernshaw drooping beside him. She alone seemed indifferent to his pretension; she seemed even insensible of it, as she broke off little corners of her ice with her fork.

      The psychologist fixed his eyes on him with scientific challenge as well as scientific interest. “Do you mean that _you_ have seen a ghost?”

      “Yes--ghost. Generically--provisionally. We always consider them ghosts, don’t we, till they prove themselves something else? I once saw an apparition.”

      Several people who were near-sighted or far-placed put on their eye-glasses, to make out whether Hewson were serious; a lady who had a handsome forearm put up a lorgnette and inspected him through it; she had the air of questioning his taste, and the subtle aura of her censure penetrated to him, though she preserved a face of rigid impassivity. He returned her stare defiantly, though he was aware of not reaching her through the lenses as effectively as she reached him. Most of those who prepared themselves to listen seemed to be putting him on trial, and they apparently justified themselves in this from the cross-questioning method the psychologist necessarily took in his wish to clarify the situation.

      “How long ago was it?” he asked, coldly.

      “Last summer.”

      “Was it after dark?”

      “Very much after. It was at day-break.”

      “Oh! You were alone?”

      “Quite.”

      “You made sure you were not dreaming?”

      “I made sure of that, instantly. I was not awakened by the apparition. I was already fully awake.”

      “Had your mind been running on anything of the kind?”

      “Nothing could have been farther from it. I was thinking what a very long while it would be till breakfast.” This was not true as to the order of the fact; but Hewson could not keep himself from saying it, and it made a laugh and created a diversion in his favor.

      “How long did it seem to last?”

      “The vision? That was very curious. The whole affair was quite achronic, as I may say. The figure was there and it was not there.”

      “It vanished suddenly?”

      “I can’t say it vanished at all. It ought still to be there. Have you ever returned to a place where you had always been wrong as to the points of the compass, and found yourself right up to a certain moment as you approached, and then without any apparent change, found yourself perfectly wrong again? The figure was not there, and it was there, and then it was not there.”

      “I think I see what you mean,” said the psychologist, warily. “The evanescence was subjective.”

      “Altogether. But so was the apparescence.”

      “Ah!” said Wanhope. “You hadn’t any headache?”

      “Not the least.”

      “Ah!” The psychologist desisted with the effect of letting the