a faded green shopping bag, with a supply of yellow writing paper, and always had tucked under one arm the curious, heart-shaped bit of wood, with the pencil attached, which spiritualists call “planchette.”  The Marshall children thought this the most laughable name imaginable, and were not always successful in restraining the cruel giggles of childhood when she spoke of planchette’s writing such beautiful messages from her long-since-dead husband and children.  Although he had a dramatic sympathy for her sorrow, Professor Marshall’s greater vivacity of temperament made it harder for him than for his wife to keep a straight face when Cousin Parnelia proposed to be the medium whereby he might converse with Milton or Homer.  Indeed, his fatigued tolerance for her had been a positive distaste ever since the day when he found her showing Sylvia, aged ten, how to write with planchette.  With an outbreak of temper, for which he had afterwards apologized to his wife, he had forbidden her ever to mention her damn unseemly nonsense to his children again.  He himself was a stout unbeliever in individual immortality, teaching his children that the craving for it was one of the egotistic impulses of the unregenerate human heart.

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 Lindstroem, 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. Howell, the editor of a luridly radical Socialist weekly paper, whom Judith called in private the “old puss-cat” on account of his soft, rather weak voice and mild, ingratiating ways.  Yes, the co-ed had been right, one met at the Marshalls’ every variety of person except the exclusive.

These habitues of the house came and went with the greatest familiarity.  As they all knew there was no servant to answer the doorbell, they seldom bothered to ring, but opened the door, stepped into the hall, hung up their wraps on the long line of hooks, and went into the big, low-ceilinged living-room.  If nobody was there, they usually took a book from one of the shelves lining the room and sat down before the fire to wait.  Sometimes they stayed to the next meal and helped wash up the dishes afterwards.  Sometimes they had a satisfactory visit with each other, two or three callers happening to meet together before the fire, and went away without having seen any of the Marshalls.  Informality could go no further.

The only occurrence in the Marshall life remotely approaching the regularity and formality of a real social event was the weekly meeting of the string quartet which Professor Marshall had founded soon after his arrival in La Chance.