Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THOUGH ONE EOSE FROM THE DEAD. Yon are very welcome to the Alderling incident, my dear Acton, if you think you can do anything with it, and I will give it as circumstantially as possible. The thing has its limitations, I should think, for the fictionist, chiefly in a sort of roundedness which leaves little play to the imagination. It seems to me that it would be more to your purpose if it were less pat, in its catastrophe, but you are a better judge of all that than I am, and I will put the facts in your hands, and keep my own hands off, so far as any plastic use of the material is concerned. The first I knew of the peculiar Alderling situation was shortly after William James's " Will to Believe " came out. I had been telling the Alderlings about it, for they had not seen it, and I noticed that from timeto time they looked significantly at each other. When I had got through he gave a little laugh, and she said, " Oh, you may laugh! " and then I made bold to ask, "What is it?" " Marion can tell you, " he said. He motioned towards the coffee-pot and asked, " More ? " I shook my head, and he said, " Come out and let us see what the maritime interests have been doing for us. Pipe or cigar ?" I chose cigarettes, and he brought the box off the table, stopping on his way to the veranda, and taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the hall mantel. Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, and done things to the chairs and cushions, and was leaning against one of the slender fluted pine columns like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, with the blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing deliciously against the background of white house- wall. He and she were an astonishing and satisfying contrast; in the midst of your amazement you felt the divine propriety of ...