were in Paris when she showed her hand, and, strange enough, she
chose to do it one afternoon when we were driving in the Bois with a
thousand fine gowns and faces to distract the attention.

"The trouble, Margaret," says she, "is that our reputation runs on ahead
of us. Here in Paris it is the same as at Vienna and Rome--we have much
more than we can attend to. I can't put my hands on two fools at once,
and I am always pained because I am American by birth, as I never yet
told you before, and I hate to see five dollars slip by, as we say over
there."

"It's too bad," I answers, "for there is no way to help it."

"Indeed!" she says. "I'm not so sure. I haven't made you my daughter for
nothing. And I'm thinking of having you treat those who I can't."

"Me!" I cries, very surprised. "You know well enough that I have no
power."

At this she leaned back on the cushions and nearly put her broadness on
Midget, her toy lap-dog, sitting beside her. But she threw her head back
and laughed her own natural laugh, as coarse as a fishmonger's and
different from the ripples she could give when anybody was around.

"Power?" says she. "Child alive! I have no power, you simple girl. When
I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting
on a sawdust pincushion in the Sahara Desert."

"But the cures?" says I, looking to see if the _cocher_ could overhear
us.

That question brought the laugh away from her, and for a minute she
looked serious.

"Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself," she
says, patting my hand.

"I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you.
Nevertheless I know surely enough it's not me that cures them. No. I
think it's their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting
their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of
weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my
dear."

It was those words of hers I have never forgotten. I've never forgotten,
for one reason, because, when I began to play for patients and worked
over them with the talk and flap-dash and monkey-shine, and got them to
pay their money freely, then half the time they would improve and say
they felt the flow of vitality, and some of them went away well and
sound as biscuits, when, before they had come to us, they had had
doctors and drugs and baths and changes of climate for nothing. I even
knew some who would swear that Welstoke'