Bean read his paper.  One shriek among the headlines was for a railroad accident in which twenty-eight lives had been lost.  He began to go down the list of names hopefully, but there was not one that he knew.  Although he wished no evil to any person, he was yet never able to suppress a strange, perverse thrill of disappointment at this result—­that there should be the name of no one he knew in all those lists of the mangled.  His food came and he ate, still striving—­the game of childhood had become unconscious habit with him now—­to make his meat and potatoes “come out even.”  The dinner de luxe was too palpably a soggy residue of that Business Men’s Lunch.  It fittingly crowned the afternoon’s catastrophes.  He turned from it to his paper and Destiny tied another knot on his bonds.  There it was in bold print: 

    COUNTESS CASANOVA
  Clairvoyant ...  Clairaudient
    Psychometric. 
  Fresh from Unparalleled European Triumphs. 
    Answers the Unasked Question.

There was more of it.  The Countess had been “prevailed upon by eminent scientists to give a brief series of tests in this city.”  Evening tests might be had from 8 to 10 P.M.  Ring third bell.

The old query came back, the old need to know what he had been before putting on this present very casual body.  Was his present state a reward or a penance?  From the time of leaving the office to the last item in that sketchy dinner, he had been put upon by persons and circumstances.  It was time to know what life meant by him.

And here was one who answered the unasked question!

Precisely at eight he rang the third bell, climbed two flights of narrow stairs and faced a door that opened noiselessly and without visible agency.  He entered a small, dimly lighted room and stood there uncertainly.  After a moment two heavy curtains parted at the rear of the room and the Countess Casanova stood before him.  It could have been no other; her lustrous, heavy-lidded dark eyes swept him soothingly.  Her hair was a marvellously piled storm-cloud above a full, well-rounded face.  Her complexion was wonderful.  One very plump, very white hand rested at the neck of the flowing scarlet robe she wore.  A moment she posed thus, beyond doubt a being capable of expounding all wingy mysteries of any soul whatsoever.

Then she became alert and voluble.  She took his hat and placed it in the hall, seated him before the table at the room’s centre and sat confronting him from the other side.  She filled her chair.  It could be seen that she was no slave to tight lacing.

Although foreign in appearance, the Countess spoke with a singularly pure and homelike American accent.  It was the speech he was accustomed to hear in Chicago.  It reassured him.

The Countess searched his face with those wonderful eyes.

“You are intensely psychic,” she announced.

Bean was aware of this.  Every medium he had ever consulted had told him so.