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Description Mr Parnham is in a quandary. Sir Bussy Woodcock has invited him to a siance and Mr Parnham is more than a little keen to keep the acquaintance going - after all, the great financier might just be his ticket to fame and fortune. But to a siance? Damned silly nonsense all this medium business! Just at the point of giving up Sir Bussy once and for all, Mr Parnham has one final change of mind and decides to go along after all. And so he does - with some very interesting results. Excerpt For a time Mr. Parham was extremely coy about Sir Bussy Woodcock’s invitation to assist at a séance. Mr. Parham did not want to be drawn into this séance business. At the same time he did not want to fall out of touch with Sir Bussy Woodcock. Sir Bussy Woodcock was one of those crude plutocrats with whom men of commanding intelligence, if they have the slightest ambition to be more than lookers-on at the spectacle of life, are obliged to associate nowadays. These rich adventurers are, under modern conditions, the necessary interpreters between high thought and low reality. It is regrettable that such difficult and debasing intervention should be unavoidable, but it seems to be so in this inexplicable world. Man of thought and man of action are mutually necessary–or, at any rate, the cooperation seems to be necessary to the man of thought. Plato, Confucius, Machiavelli had all to seek their princes. Nowadays, when the stuffing is out of princes, men of thought must do their best to use rich men. Rich men amenable to use are hard to find and often very intractable when found. There was much in Sir Bussy, for example, that a fine intelligence, were it not equipped with a magnificent self-restraint, might easily have found insupportable. He was a short ruddy freckled man with a nose sculptured in the abrupt modern style and a mouth like a careless gash; he was thickset, a thing irritating in itself to an associate of long slender lines, and he moved with an impulsive rapidity of