Poor Strangers, They Have So Much To

She Had Taken To Wondering Lately, During These Swift-counted Years, What Had Been Done With All Those Wasted Summer Days; How Could She Have Spent Them So Wantonly? I Am Foolish, She Told Herself Early Every Summer, I Am Very Foolish; I Am Grown Up Now And Know The Values Of Things. Nothing Is Ever Really Wasted, She Believed Sensibly, Even One's Childhood, And Then Each Year, One Summer Morning, The Warm Wind Would Come Down The City Street Where She Walked And She Would Be Touched With The Little Cold Thought: I Have Let More Time Go By.

Certainly There Are Spots Which Inevitably Attach To Themselves An Atmosphere Of Holiness And Goodness; It Might Not Then Be Too Fanciful To Say That Some Houses Are Born Bad.

I Was Thinking, I Could Turn Him Into A Fly And Drop Him Into A Spider's Web And Watch Him Tangled And Helpless And Struggling, Shut Into The Body Of A Dying Buzzing Fly; I Could Wish Him Dead Until He Died.i Could Fasten Him To A Tree And Keep Him There Until He Grew Into The Trunk And Bark Grew Over His Mouth. If He Was Under The Ground I Could Walk Over Him Stamping My Feet.

Gossip Says She Hanged Herself From The Turret On The Tower, But When You Have A House Like Hill House With A Tower And A Turret, Gossip Would Hardly Allow You To Hang Yourself Anywhere Else.

No, The Menace Of The Supernatural Is That It Attacks Where Modern Minds Are Weakest, Where We Have Abandoned Our Protective Armor Of Superstition And Have No Substitute Defense.