By the time Miss Ida Ludington was twenty-five years old she recognized that she had done with happiness, and that the pale pleasures of memory were all which remained to her. She starts developing the idea of immortality and decides to go to New York and find a medium who can help her materialize the spirit of her youth.

Edward Bellamy (1850-1898) was an American author and socialist, most famous for his utopian novel, Looking Backward, a tale set in the distant future of the year 2000. Bellamy's vision of a harmonious future world inspired the formation of at least 165 "Nationalist Clubs" dedicated to the propagation of Bellamy's political ideas and working to make them a practical reality.