"Aesthetic attraction!" This was Edna again, whose outbursts were now starting to make me wish that I were anywhere else but sitting next to her in the line of Bunyan's fire. Belatedly, I laid a restraining hand lightly on her arm, but she shook me off and forged heedlessly ahead. "But if you are convinced that spiritualism is so much rot, then why write your ghost stories?"

I try again to read the tone of her voice. Sylva can form herself of vapor or rain or the force of a storm, but she is always shifting, liquid, and invisible when she wishes. She can hold my face with fingers of wind, but she has no face of her own to touch. I cannot read pain on her features, but I think I hear it in her voice.