"Smith: An Episode in a Lodging-House" by Algernon Blackwood

to scrape acquaintance: I've never heard this expression before. Is this a British thing? Or just an obsolete thing? Any Brits in the audience care to chime in?

on the qui vive: on the alert or lookout. Blackwood has been pretty good so far about not sprinkling any French into his texts. First one so far. Hopefully the last...

12 shillings a week: 12s in 1906, depending on how you do your inflation adjustment, would be between £68 and £670. A google search suggests that you can get cheap hostel lodgings in Edinburgh for something like £18 a night, which is £126 a week, and that's a nightly rate, not a weekly rate, so £68 might be a tad too low, but it's probably not *too* far off from what might be possible today.

incarnate: in the flesh; in human form
discarnate: having no physical body; incorporeal

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/14471/14471-h/14471-h.htm#chapter7

For those of you who have been following along since at least "Zanoni", or are otherwise familiar with that work, who did it better? Blackwood of Bulwer-Lytton?

Regardless, it would be interesting to have this story re-told from Smith's perspective. There's a story prompt for any budding young authors out there!