l be
yours. It's happened; it will happen again; but generally when I can't
make any use of it.

"I'm goin' a long way round to get home. There's some so big that they
don't have to fake. Sometimes, of course, the controls won't come to
them, but they can afford to tell a sitter they can't sense nothin',
because the next sitter will get the real stuff--the stuff you can't
fake. Mrs. Fife is that way. I've seen her work and I know. I know just
as well about Mrs. Markham, though I haven't seen her. She keeps tight
shut up away from the rest of us. She never mixes. But some of us have
seen her, they've passed it on.

"Mediums," added Rosalie Le Grange, after a pause, "is a set of pipe
dreamers as a class, but there's one place where you can take their
word like it was sworn to on the Bible. It's when they say somebody has
the real thing. Because mediums is knockers, and when they pass out a
bouquet, you can bet they mean it. No, young man, Mrs. Markham, if she
_does_ play a lone hand, is the real thing. But I may help you waste
your money."

The young man had lost his air of cynical levity, he was regarding
Rosalie Le Grange somewhat as a collector regards a new and
unclassified species.

"Why?" he asked.

"Who's the greatest doctor in the world?" asked Mme. Le Grange.

"Watkins, I suppose," responded the young man.

"What'd you give for a chance to stay in his office a month and see him
work? See?"

He nodded his head.

"Of course."

"I was a darned little fool when I was young," pursued Rosalie Le
Grange, "an' now that I'm gettin' on in years I'm just as darned an old
one. I like to take chances. See?"

"Mme. Le Grange," said her sitter, again clapping her rounded shoulder,
"you're a fellow after my heart."

"Just a second before we come to the bouquets," responded Rosalie Le
Grange, "there's another reason. Can you guess it?"

"I've already given up guessing on you."

On the table beside Mme. Le Grange lay an embroidery frame, the needle
set in a puffy red peony. Mme. Le Grange picked it up and took a stitch
or two. Her head bent over her work, so that the playful light made
gold of the white in her chestnut hair, she pursued:

"Maybe you specialize on mendin' people's bones and maybe your
specialty is their insides. I've got a specialty, too. You see, in this
business it's easy to go all to the bad unless you do somethin' for
other people. You have to have a kind of religion to tie to. Mine is
uni