THE house of the medium stood in a section some small distance north of the river, where the rebuilders of the seventies imagined that a fashionable residence district would endure. With the lesson of the great fire bitterly learned, they reared their mansions of brick and stone and tile, with brick foundations and solid interior walls; stone copings distinguished their façades; window and door sills were stone, ponderously laid; their rails were iron, secure against destruction. They built for a century of occupancy and when, after a generation, the owners began to desert for the more fashionable districts farther north and east, they abandoned dwellings altogether too substantial to be torn down or even to be greatly remodeled; so into the residences, bakers and candy makers, dry cleaners, tailors, hairdressers, masseurs and chiropodists came. Many of the old homes became boarding houses; here and there an old family—impoverished or stubborn—clung to its hearth with the result of making the neighborhood more hopelessly nondescript. It was near the middle of one of the most mixed and tawdry of these blocks that the medium Davol practiced her profession in gloomy, mustily furnished rooms where congregated many who sought communication with the world beyond and where—as many believed—souls of the dead visited and spoke.
