“Well, you’re a doctor—­I don’t have to tell you how easy it is to make a person think they’re sick.  And that’s my specialty—­makin’ people think things.  In half an hour, I had that girl whoop-in’ an’ Martin telephonin’ for a doctor.  Then I broke the news over the house telephone to Mrs. Markham.  She waited ten minutes, and called me down.  It come out just as I figured.  She wanted me to ’tend door.  I’d been playin’ the genteel stupid, you know, so she trusted me.  And I must say I’d rather she hated me, the way I’m out to do her.  She told me that I was to sit by the door and bring in the names of callers, and if anyone come after eight o’clock, I was to step into the outside hall and get rid of ’em as quick as I could.  Now let me tell you, that killed another suspicion.  One way, the best way of fakin’ in a big house, is to have the maid rob the pockets of people’s wraps for letters an’ calling cards an’ such.  I’d thought maybe Ellen played that game, she acted so stupid; but here I was lettin’ in the visitors, me only, a week in the house.  I took the coats off her callers myself and I watched them wraps all the time.  Nobody ever approached ’em while I looked.  She had only four sitters, two men and two women—­an old married couple an’ a brother an’ sister, I took it from their looks an’ the way they acted toward each other.  The old couple were rich and tony.  They didn’t flash any jewelry, but her shoes and gloves were made to order and her coat had a Paris mark inside.  The brother and sister must be way up, too; he was dressed quiet but rich, and he had a Bankers’ Association pin in his buttonhole.  Yes, they wasn’t paupers, and that’s the only fake sign I’ve seen about Mrs. Markham.  But that’s nothin’.  Stands to reason the best people go to the best mediums, just like they go to the best doctors and preachers.

“That sittin’, you hear me, was real.  I got by the double doors where I could listen.  You just hear me—­it was real.  You ain’t a sensitive.  You’ve followed knowledge and not influences, and it’s going to be hard for me to git this into you.  So I’ll tell you first how it would have looked to you, and then how it looked to me.  I’m not sayin’ what she gave wasn’t something she got out of test books and memorandums, because I don’t know her people or yet how much she’d had to do with them.  It was the way it come out that impressed me.  First place, she didn’t go into trance.  That’s a fake to impress dopes, nine times out of ten.  If you ever git anything real from me, you’ll git it out of half trance.  Then she didn’t feel around an’ fish, an’ neither did she hit the bull’s eye every time.  She’d get the truth all tangled up.  John would say a true thing, that only he knew, and she’d think she got it from James.  Her sitters were fine acknowledgers, especially the old maid, and I could tell.  That’s how I would ‘a’ looked to you, and now let me tell you how it struck me.  You don’t have to believe it.