“Oh, if you’re going to read a lot of irrelevant material—­”

“Irrelevant nothing!  Wake up, Horace!  But remember this.  I’m not explaining the physical phenomena.  We’ll never do that.  It wasn’t extraordinary, as such things go.  Our little medium in a trance condition has read poor Clara’s mind.  It’s all here, all that Clara knew and nothing that she didn’t know.  A mind-reader, friend Horace.  And Heaven help me when I marry her!”

********

As I have said, the Neighborhood Club ended its investigations with this conclusion, which I believe is properly reached.  It is only fair to state that there are those among us who have accepted that theory in the Wells case, but who have preferred to consider that behind both it and the physical phenomena of the seances there was an intelligence which directed both, an intelligence not of this world as we know it.  Both Herbert and Alice Robinson are now pronounced spiritualists, although Miss Jeremy, now Mrs. Sperry, has definitely abandoned all investigative work.

Personally, I have evolved no theory.  It seems beyond dispute that certain individuals can read minds, and that these same, or other so-called “sensitives,” are capable of liberating a form of invisible energy which, however, they turn to no further account than the useless ringing of bells, moving of small tables, and flinging about of divers objects.

To me, I admit, the solution of the Wells case as one of mind-reading is more satisfactory than explanatory.  For mental waves remain a mystery, acknowledged, as is electricity, but of a nature yet unrevealed.  Thoughts are things.  That is all we know.

Mrs. Dane, I believe, had suspected the solution from the start.

The Neighborhood Club has recently disbanded.  We tried other things, but we had been spoiled.  Our Kipling winter was a failure.  We read a play or two, with Sperry’s wife reading the heroine, and the rest of us taking other parts.  She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry.  But it was all stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair.  With Herbert on a lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a sanatorium for the winter, we have now given it up, and my wife and I spend our Monday evenings at home.

After dinner I read, or, as lately, I have been making this record of the Wells case from our notes.  My wife is still fond of the phonograph, and even now, as I make this last entry and complete my narrative, she is waiting for me to change the record.  I will be frank.  I hate the phonograph.  I hope it will be destroyed, or stolen.  I am thinking very seriously of having it stolen.

“Horace,” says my wife, “whatever would we do without the phonograph?  I wish you would put it in the burglar-insurance policy.  I am always afraid it will be stolen.”

Even here, you see!  Truly thoughts are things.