Something About Eve

FOR some moments after he had materialized, and had become perceivable by human senses, the Sylan waited. He waited, looking down at the very busy, young, red-haired fellow who sat within arm’s reach at the writing-table. This boy, as yet, was so unhappily engrossed in literary composition as not to have noticed his ghostly visitant. So the Sylan waited....

And as always, to an onlooker, the motions of creative writing revealed that flavor of the grotesque which is attendant upon every form of procreation. The Sylan rather uneasily noted the boy’s writhing antics, which to a phantom seemed strange and eerie.... For this mortal world, as the Sylan well remembered, was remarkably opulent in things which gave pleasure when they were tasted or handled,—the world in which this pensive boy was handling, and now nibbled at, the tip-end of a black pen. Outside this somewhat stuffy room were stars or sunsets or impressive mountains, to be looked at from almost anywhere in this mortal world,—which would also afford to the investigative, who searched in appropriate places, such agreeable smells as that of vervain and patchouli, and of smouldering incense, and of hayfields under a large moon, and of pine woods, and the robustious salty odors of a wind coming up from the sea.