"I am, yes," he replied, rather ungraciously, for he was eager to revert to Leo.
"Perhaps you're a medium yourself," the old lady pursued.
"Thank the Lord, no! I haven't the ghost of a Voice about me."
She chuckled. "At your age one thinks only of love and dollars. When you are as old as I am the next world will interest you a great deal more than it does now. Besides, you must believe in spirits after they have made you rich. They've made Louise and Leo rich--I suppose you know that?"
He soon turned back to Leo. "I wish people would not talk my mother's Voices to me. I hear nothing else now."
"It's your mother's 'atmosphere.' No one thinks of anything else when in her presence."
"Don't you see how intolerable all that is going to be for me?" he asked, with bitter gravity. "I can see that she isn't exactly human even to you. She's just a sort of a freak. No one loves her or seeks her for herself alone, only for what she can do. That's another reason why I must insist on her getting away from this. I will not have her treated like a wireless telephone."
Her eyes expressed more sympathy than she put into her voice. "I see what you mean; but, believe me, I had not thought of her in just that light, and I think you're quite wrong about my aunt. She is really very fond of your mother."
He was eager to know more of what this clear-sighted girl had seen, but her neighbor, Mr. Carew, claimed her, and he was forced back upon Grandmother Wood, who talked of her new faith to him for nearly half an hour.
After dinner, while the ladies were in the drawing-room and the men were smoking their cigars, the perturbed youth expected to be freed from any further inquisition, for Philo Wood was apparently of that type of man who has no interest in the things he cannot turn into hard cash. The merits of a new strawboard box-machine was engaging his attention at this time, but, after a few minutes of polite discussion of the weather and other general topics, Carew, the lawyer, turned to Victor and began an interrogation which made him wince. Carew was very nice about it, but he pursued such a well-defined line of inquiry that it amounted to a cross-examination. He soon possessed himself of the fact that Victor did not approve of his mother's way of life and that he was trying to secure employment in order to stop all further "fortune-telling" on his mother's part. "I don't believe in it," he reiterated.