Maggie glanced at him. His tone was a little too much detached.
“I thought her quite dreadful,” she said frankly. “Didn’t you?” she added.
“Oh yes, I suppose so,” said Laurie. He drew out a cigarette and lighted it. “You know a lot of people think there’s something in it,” he said.
“In what?”
“Spiritualism.”
“I daresay,” said Maggie.
She perceived out of the corner of her eye that Laurie looked at her suddenly and sharply. For herself, she loathed what little she knew of the subject, so cordially and completely, that she could hardly have put it into words. Nine-tenths of it she believed to be fraud—a matter of wigs and Indian muslin and cross-lights—and the other tenth, by the most generous estimate, an affair of the dingiest and foulest of all the backstairs of life. The prophetic outpourings of Mrs. Stapleton had not altered her opinion.
“Oh! if you feel like that—” went on Laurie.
She turned on him.
“Laurie,” she said, “I think it perfectly detestable. I acknowledge I don’t know much about it; but what little I do know is enough, thank you.”
Laurie smiled in a faintly patronizing way.
“Well,” he said indulgently, “if you think that, it’s not much use discussing it.”
“Indeed it’s not,” said Maggie, with her nose in the air.