“People aren’t real, if they have not work,” she went on eagerly. “That is one of the things I saw as I was growing up. I don’t mean just a hobby. I mean work. It’s wonderful what it does to people. Take all the ordinary people in our office. And Lizzie, that girl at Mac’s who waits on me. It makes them originals, not imitations. And Mac, look at him. Something in his own right.”
“Yes, you have the idea,” he smiled. “Stick to it. I’m glad you can admire a man like Mac. You ought to see him in the bar. That is where he is really great. He broods like a gigantic puck over that motley crowd with a kind of puzzled expression, contemptuous and amused.”
Dane talked on about him and the types of men about the river till they had finished. Then he produced a bottle of wine and they began to smoke.
“It’s wonderful to have someone who understands,” she said impulsively, after they had raised their glasses to each other. “I wish you could see how my relatives would look if I told them I admired people like Mac.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you don’t worry about them now, do you?”
“Not in the least. They’re all dead.”
He raised his eyebrows enquiringly.
She sat up talking eagerly, so much so that he wondered for a moment if the wine could have affected her so soon.
“You see, I killed them all years ago, all but dad. It was a grand scheme. I don’t remember now how the idea came to me. But I made ghosts of them. I said to myself, ‘Let them be like the furniture. There’s a chair. It is an object. It can’t hurt me. It is a dead thing.’ And I began to imagine them dead one by one. And I learned what you could do with your imagination. Aunt Maud was my first ghost, because she was the worst. And then
