ABSTRACT
A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, the author would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity but that would be asking too much of fate. John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures. The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, but the pattern is torturing. There is one marked peculiarity about this paper; a thing nobody seems to notice but him, and that is that it changes as the light changes. Sometimes the author think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.
