An authentic, guaranteed, proved ghost, but; only a ghost, alas! Only that. 🔊 In his first visit Soames was a creature of flesh and blood, whereas the creatures among whom he was projected were but ghosts, I take it—solid, palpable, vocal, but unconscious and automatic ghosts, in a building that was itself an illusion. 🔊 Next time that building and those creatures will be real. 🔊 It is of Soames that there will be but the semblance. 🔊 I wish I could think him destined to revisit the world actually, physically, consciously. 🔊 I wish he had this one brief escape, this one small treat, to look forward to. 🔊 I never forget him for long. 🔊 He is where he is and forever. 🔊 The more rigid moralists among you may say he has only himself to blame. 🔊 For my part, I think he has been very hardly used. 🔊 It is well that vanity should be chastened; and Enoch Soames's vanity was, I admit, above the average, and called for special treatment. 🔊 But there was no need for vindictiveness. 🔊 You say he contracted to pay the price he is paying. 🔊 Yes; but I maintain that he was induced to do so by fraud. 🔊 Well informed in all things, the devil must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to futurity. 🔊 The whole thing was a very shabby trick. 🔊 The more I think of it, the more detestable the devil seems to me. 🔊

Of him I have caught sight several times, here and there, since that day at the Vingtième. 🔊 Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters. 🔊 This was a couple of years ago, in Paris. 🔊 I was walking one afternoon along the rue d'Antin, and I saw him advancing from the opposite direction, overdressed as ever, and swinging an ebony cane and altogether behaving as though the whole pavement belonged to him. 🔊 At thought of Enoch Soames and the myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute's dominion, a great cold wrath filled me, and I drew myself up to my full height. 🔊 But—well, one is so used to nodding and smiling in the street to anybody whom one knows that the action becomes almost independent of oneself; 🔊 to prevent it requires a very sharp effort and great presence of mind. 🔊 I was miserably aware, as I passed the devil, that I nodded and smiled to him. 🔊 And my shame was the deeper and hotter because he, if you please, stared straight at me with the utmost haughtiness. 🔊

To be cut, deliberately cut, by him! 🔊 I was, I still am, furious at having had that happen to me. 🔊