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it brought. She knew she was quite capable of working throughout her sick time, but she certainly wasn't going to argue with Mildred about it. Mildred thought permanent damage could be done to a woman who overstrained her constitution at such times. And a menstruating woman (not that such a word ever passed her lips) could do harm to others as well: milk would turn and bread not rise in her presence, and the scent of her would drive domestic animals wild. Modesty forbade a woman displaying herself when the curse was upon her, which meant she must keep to herself and the company of women. Eustacia thought Mildred was over-nice in regard to their father -- after all, he had been married and shared a bed with his wife for years -- but she was happy enough to avoid her brothers, and even more men to whom she was not related. The thought that they might notice something wrong with her was humiliating. She was happy to keep to her room and rest.
    It was not until late that evening, after Mildred had taken away her supper dishes and left her an empty chamber pot and a bundle of clean towels, that she felt the tingling in her fingers again. She realized then that they were cold, and, as she tucked them into her armpits to warm them, she felt the dampness.
    She stared at her hands and saw the mucus blobs swelling and stretching from her fingertips, elongating and thickening as she watched into fingers --
    "No!"
    Long fingers, hands, bony wrists -- hands she recognized.
    "No!"
    Denial was of no use. It was in her, and it had to come out. She thought she could feel it seeping out of the flesh beneath her breasts and behind her knees, and there was a tickling sensation on the soles of her feet. She couldn't keep it in. It had to come out.
    It had to, but he didn't. She stared at the hands and willed them to break off at the wrists. Two disembodied hands floated free, but more of the whitish matter gushed out, forming new hands.
    Ectoplasm, Mr. Elphinstone had called it. The stuff produced by the bodies of the living to provide the dead with temporary flesh.
    There were his hands, his arms. . . . But why his? Dead or alive, she had no wish to communicate with him. If she was to provide a habitation for spirits they should at least be shapes of her own choosing.
    She thought about her mother. Her mother had had lovely hands, even though roughened by toil: slender fingers, graceful, shapely hands. As she thought of them, creating them in her mind, they were recreated before her. Cloudy, milky shapes, but recognizably not Mr. Elphinstone's hands. They were a woman's hands. Her mother's hands.
    She gazed at them with feelings of awe and accomplishment, unsure whether this was her own work, or if she had her mother's spirit to thank for routing Mr. Elphinstone. She tried to join arms onto the hands, wanting to see more of her mother, but, as she struggled, she fell asleep.
    Her hands stayed dry through the night, but this time she did not expect that condition to last. Indeed, her fingers were dripping like infected sores before midday.
    She knew that meant Mr. Elphinstone was trying to get out. She didn't know exactly why, but she could guess: she had read enough novels. This was not the usual way that men attempted to overpower young women, but that didn't mean it was any less dangerous. Probably, she thought, he had been planning this from the start, from the very first moment when his damp, chilly flesh had pressed hers. She didn't know how his ghost could harm her, or even if it could, but she would certainly not give it the chance to try.
    During the next four days Eustacia successfully fought off his every attempt to return. She couldn't stop the ectoplasm, but she could control the forms it took. It was hard work, but she enjoyed it. She came to think of it as a new kind of art, a sort of mental modeling, as if the ectoplasm had been clay, and she was using the fingers of her mind to push and smooth and mold it into the shapes of her