t him.

I took up my position on the fringe of the group. "Talking of psychics, the
occult and all that sort of thing," I remarked carelessly, "isn't
cheiromancy an interesting study?"

"Nasty sort of study, I should call it," murmured one of the company,
evidently under a vague impression that it had something to do with feet.
My hostess looked up sharply. "Cheiromancy," she repeated; "can you read
the hand?"

"Only a little," I confessed modestly. "Just enough to----"

I don't quite know how it happened. There was a sort of flank and rear
movement and the entire company, excepting, of course, the dank
spiritualist, precipitated itself on me. Voices clamoured for me to
foretell destinies. Hands were thrust before me. They eddied, surged and
swirled about me. I never saw such a massed quantity of hands. It was like
leaving a Swiss hotel in the height of the season.

"One at a time, please," I said limply.

I seized a palm, followed it up, and found that it belonged to a pinched
sour-looking female. Her character was stamped on her face as well as on
her hand. If, however, I had said to her, "Yours is a flaccid repressed
disposition you have a lack of imagination and a total absence of humour;
your life is too narrow and self-centred to be of the least interest to
anyone," she might not have liked it. You see, with even a slight knowledge
of palmistry you soon find out when reading hands that it's no use telling
people the truth. They want a version which I can only describe as
"garbled."

Accordingly I bent over the repressed female's hand with an air of
profundity and said, "There being a total absence of the mounts of Mercury
and the Sun, a calm and even nature is indicated." (You're nearly always
safe in saying this.) "Your sense of order and of the fitness of things
would not allow you to see any fun in the joke of, say, pulling away a
chair from anyone about to sit down. In fact you would not see a joke in
anything--like that," I added hastily, and gave her hand back, feeling I
had made the best of a bad job.

But she still lingered.

"Does it show if I shall----?" She paused in embarrassment.

"Get married?" I asked, knowing human nature better than palmistry.

She looked so fiercely eager, with such a vivid light of hope in her eye,
that I decided to award her a husband on the spot.

"The Hepatica line, being allied to the line of Fate," I said impressively
"signifies that you will marry--late in li