In so far as she had ever thought about it--and she had never really thought about it at all--Miss Farrow regarded all that she knew of spiritualism as a gigantic fraud.

It annoyed her fastidiousness to think that her own niece should be in any way associated with that kind of thing.

She realized the temptation it must offer to a clever girl who, as her father truly said, had had as a child an uncanny power of thought-reading, and of "willing" people to do what she liked.
Blanche Farrow smiled and sighed as she stared into the fire.

How the world had changed! She could not imagine her own father, though he had been far less conventional than was Hugh Dunster, talking her over with a young man.
Poor Bill Donnington! Of course he was devoted to Bubbles--her slave, in fact.

Blanche had only seen him once; she had thought him sensible, undistinguished, commonplace.