Vera is a fraudulent medium, and knows it - and then, at a séance staged to swindle a rich woman out of an estate, she says something she could not have known. Davis was the most famous reporter of his age and the model for the Gibson Man; he wrote this in 1908 out of the exposures of spiritualist fraud he had covered, and Vera's own doubt about herself is the sharpest thing in it.

Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) was an American journalist and author. He worked as a war correspondent for the New York Herald and other newspapers during the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and World War I, and wrote fiction including The Princess Aline, The Scarlet Car, The King's Jackal, The Lion and the Unicorn, The Red Cross Girl, The Lost House, and Vera, the Medium.