Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

bein he A young American who made a brilliant début in this country with her novel, ‘“‘ The Love Eaters,’ Mary Lee Settle comes from the Southern States, and though she now lives in London, it ts the South that forms the framework and the heart of her writing, both in her most recent novel, “‘ The Kiss of Kin,” and in this delightful new short story—her first to appear in England. HAUNTED SUMMER BY MARY LEE SETTLE HAT summer was weighted down with heat, so hot that the grown people stayed indoors most of the time, or sat on the long verandah and slowly rocked back and forth, fanning themselves, trying to push the heat away from their faces. That was the summer my grandmother went spiritualist. I was ten. I spent the first part of the summer being wonder- fully frightened by slipping into her room, and reading Ghost _ Stories or True Spiritual Experiences or Voices from Beyond. I would sit in the corner in the afternoon, for she was never there then, she always slept in the hammock on the downstairs back orch. 4 There in the half-dark, in the cool half-dark (for the blinds were drawn against the heat outside), the room was deep green, strangely larger than when the sun was allowed in, and it had the still silence of a room waiting—or asleep. Her big rocker would be empty, but the overstuffed seat was bent with use so that it didn’t seem empty. Against the wall stood the huge bed that my Aunt Phemie had died in; my Aunt Eliza said she lingered for months after and that the hole never healed at all, not from the time they brought her home. The big bed sank in the middle, too, and that too seemed occupied, occupied by—I was learning a new language— ectoplasm and heat. There I would sit with my back tight against the wall, for \ hte ert “ w comlicbooks.com