gthened with every year of her life. It was an _idee fixe_."

"Well?"

"Well. Esther died a poor woman, but if she had left fifty thousand
to--to a home for blind mulattoes, say, the first thing her nephews
would have brought forward was that idea of Charley Ross."

"Brought forward?"

"To break her will. They would have said that it proved her mentally
incapable."

"But it doesn't, Will, does it?"

"That's just as you see it. She wasn't incapable of looking after us
and dressing mother and doing the marketing and keeping the accounts
and making all her own clothes and some of ours. But if you ask me if
she had a perfectly normal mind, I should have to say no."

"I see, Will."

I was extremely interested: I seemed to see, glimmering far off, what
we were getting to, and it was gripping, absorbing. But I had no idea
what we really were getting to--not then.

"Now, we'll take another case," he said, at another cigarette.

"I was at Lourdes last year, as you know, studying the Pilgrimage.
Curious thing. Not an atom of proof, you see, that anybody was ever
cured of a headache there. Not even sense enough to use the immense
suggestive power that's massed there to do real good to neurasthenics
and hysterics--in fact, they try to bar them. They prefer goitre,
which is _not_ cured by dirty baths, unfortunately. The people who go
away from there think they were cured from this, that and the other;
whole business founded on a perfectly authenticated case of _dementia
praecox_--as much a pathological condition as gout or insomnia. I
interviewed a prize case; she appeared before their bluff at a
scientific council and presented affidavits of cure from consumption, a
year previous. I examined her later. It was--as the man
said--interesting if true, but the trouble was, it wasn't true, for she
was nearly gone, then. I gave her three months, and she died, I took
pains to learn, in ten weeks. Well: that was her delusion. Was she
sane?"

"She was misinformed--mistaken."

"Quite so--but she _knew_ she was cured, remember. She felt it. The
rest of us didn't.

"Now let's go a step farther, if you don't mind. Beatrix tells me that
the Almighty God, the creator of the universe, is the father of the son
of a young Jewess, and sacrificed his son in order to save the world.
This seems to me fantastic, frankly. But mind you, aunty, though I
know that druggist wasn't Charley Ross, and though I know that the
m