'And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest of us,' I admitted.
'What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made of haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be a "lark"; he had come expecting it to be a "lark," and here it was, nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't made a perfect mess of—and through all the wastes of eternity he never would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps He paused at that, and stood regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, nobody, not any one, ever, had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing now. I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head him off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend, the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings, ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. "Don't you brood on these things too much," I said. "The thing you've got to do is to get out of this—get out of this sharp. You pull yourself together and try." "I can't," he said. "You try," I said, and try he did.'
'Try!' said Sanderson. 'How?'
'Passes,' said Clayton.
'Passes?'
'Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! what a business I had!'
'But how could any series of passes' I began.
'My dear man,' said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis on certain words, 'you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I know is that
