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went on the wall, although Mrs. Faun said that it would cost to repair the hole. Cabot liked my painting, and Brand. Mrs. Flanner poked it with her finger and said it took her back. Mrs. Faun said it would cost to repair the hole.
    â€œWhat do you do, Mrs. Motorman?” Brand asked me.
    â€œA little shoplifting, sometimes,” I told him. “Some meddling.”
    â€œWhat brought you to our city?”
    â€œCuriosity,” I told him.
    Brand and Cabot asked me up for cocktails, and Mrs. Faun asked me for Sunday dinner, and Mrs. Flanner asked me if I played bridge and I said no. I walked to the end of Smith Street and around in the little park, under the trees. One day I went back to the streetcar and got on and went into the center of the city, where I went into the first large store and looked at blouses.
    â€œIf you don’t have this blouse in a size forty-four,” I told the salesgirl, “I’ll just run across the street and look.” I didn’t go across the street, actually; I spoke to a lady in a drugstore where I stopped to have a sandwich and a milk shake. “They’re all chemicals now,” she said to me. “You can’t even buy pure vanilla. All chemicals.”
    â€œIn a drugstore you’d expect chemicals.”
    â€œEverywhere. You think you’re drinking chocolate in that milk shake? Nothing but chemicals.”
    â€œI didn’t actually come into the city for a milk shake, though; I came to buy a blouse.”
    â€œWell,
they
’re chemical. Clothes, food, drink, plants growing in nothing but water, laboratories overcrowded, it’s a bad world.”
    â€œBourbon—”
    â€œIt’s all this mad race into space,” she said, and went away.
    When I got onto the streetcar to go back, it said S MITH S TREET in big letters on the front; “Does this streetcar go to Smith Street?” I asked the motorman, and he looked at me for a minute and then he said very quietly, “Yes, ma’am, it surely does.”
    â€œThank you,” I said. “How is your wife’s asthma?”
    â€œI am not married,” he said, “thank God.”

5
    When I decided it was time for me to give a seance, I spoke to Mrs. Faun first, of course, since it was her house and I had no idea how she might feel about people coming around asking in her own house; “I thought I might hold a kind of a small seance,” I said to her.
    â€œWhat would that include?” she asked me.
    â€œWell, I sit in the middle, and everyone sits around, and we might have sherry. And then I give messages.”
    â€œWho provides the sherry?”
    â€œEveryone has
some
kind of a question they’d like to get answered. Some kind of a question can only be answered from beyond.”
    I was sure she was going to say “Beyond what?” so I said quickly, “You don’t have to believe if you don’t want to.”
    â€œThank you,” she said. “I’ll let you have the cooking sherry.”
    â€œMay I use the little parlor?”
    â€œThat means I’d have to come,” Mrs. Faun said. “Unless I choose to sit in the kitchen all the time.”
    â€œI’d be honored if you’d come.”
    â€œWho else would be here?”
    I had made a little sign reading M ESSAGES O BTAINED . Q UESTIONS A NSWERED . F ORTUNES and tacked it up in the bookshop I found my first day. Several people had been interested. The bookshop lady had promised to let them know. So I told Mrs. Faun, “I think there will be several people. And of course anyone from the house.”
    â€œNot Tom. I don’t allow him seances.”
    â€œHas the question ever come up before?”
    â€œNot that I ever thought it would. But he can read all right in his room. He doesn’t listen in.”
    â€œOne reason I want to use the little parlor is that chair.”
    Mrs. Faun actually laughed. “It used to be my