did it, or spirits.  I’ve glimpsed the ring on a girl’s left hand, and right then my voices have said, ‘Engaged!’ Now was it me makin’ that voice, or the spirit?  I don’t know.  But when you begin to guess, you find how easy people are—­how they swallow fakes and cry for more.  As sitters go, fakin’ gets ’em a lot harder than the real stuff.  An’ before long—­it’s easy—­you’re slipping the slates or bringing spooks from cabinets—­let me tell you no medium ever did that genuine.  But it’s funny how long the real thing stays.  Now you—­I called your father Wilfred.  Maybe I’ll wake up to-morrow night, seein’ your face, and a voice will come right out of the air and say a name—­and it’ll 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: