healing. I have an office in East Fourteenth street. It is a
blessed religious work. But I can't work without pay; I follow it as a
business, and it's got to support me. I have as much right to get on in
the world as anybody else. Now I've cleared over and above my
office-rent, including what I get for teaching a class in Christian
Science, almost eighteen hundred dollars in the very first year since I
set up. That's pretty good for a lone woman; don't you think so?"

Phillida slightly inclined her head to avoid speaking.

"Well, now, I haven't got many advantages. My brother kept a health-lift
a few years ago when everything was cured by condensed exercise. But
people got tired of condensed exercise, and then he had a blue-glass
solarium until that somehow went out of fashion. I helped run the female
side of his business, you know, for part of the profits. My education is
all business. I didn't have any time to learn painting or fine manners,
or any music, except to play Moody-and-Sankeys on the melodeon. My
practice is mostly among the poor, or the people that are only so-so. I
haven't got the ways that go down with rich people, nor anybody to give
me a start among them. Well, now, I say to myself, science is all very
well, and faith is all very well, but you want something more than that
to get on in a large way. I would rather get on in a large way. Wouldn't
you?"

Here she paused, but Phillida sat motionless and stoically attentive.
She only answered, "Well, I don't know."

"Now, when I heard that you'd been sent for to the Maginnis child, and
that you have got relations that go among rich people, I says to myself,
she's my partner. I'll furnish the science, and I'll do the talking, and
the drumming-up business, and the collecting bills, and all that; and
you, with your stylish ways, don't you know? and your good looks, and
your family connections, and all that, will help me to get in where I
want to get in. Once in, we're sure to win. There's no reason, Miss
Callender, why we shouldn't get rich. I will give you half of my
practice already established, and I'll teach you the science and how to
manage, you know; the great thing is to know how to manage your
patients, you see. I learned that in the health-lift and the blue-glass
solarium. We'll move farther up town, say to West Thirty-fourth street.
Then you can, no doubt, write a beautiful letter--that'll qualify us to
go into what is called 'absent treatment.' W