First, Howells and I had a chat together.  I asked about Mrs. H. He said she was fine, still steadily improving, and nearly back to her old best health.  I asked (as if I didn’t know): 

“What do you attribute this strange miracle to?”

“Mind-cure—­simply mind-cure.”

“Lord, what a conversion!  You were a scoffer three months ago.”

“I?  I wasn’t.”

“You were.  You made elaborate fun of me in this very room.”

“I did not, Clemens.”

“It’s a lie, Howells, you did.”

I detailed to him the conversation of that time—­with the stately argument furnished by Boyesen in the fact that a patient had actually been killed by a mind-curist; and Howells’s own smart remark that when the mind-curist is done with you, you have to call in a “regular” at last because the former can’t procure you a burial permit.

At last he gave in—­he said he remembered that talk, but had now been a mind-curist so long it was difficult for him to realize that he had ever been anything else.

Mrs. H. came skipping in, presently, the very person, to a dot, that she used to be, so many years ago.

Mrs. H. said:  “People may call it what they like, but it is just hypnotism, and that’s all it is—­hypnotism pure and simple.  Mind-cure! —­the idea!  Why, this woman that cured me hasn’t got any mind.  She’s a good creature, but she’s dull and dumb and illiterate and—­”

“Now Eleanor!”

“I know what I’m talking about!—­don’t I go there twice a week?  And Mr. Clemens, if you could only see her wooden and satisfied face when she snubs me for forgetting myself and showing by a thoughtless remark that to me weather is still weather, instead of being just an abstraction and a superstition—­oh, it’s the funniest thing you ever saw!  A-n-d-when she tilts up her nose-well, it’s—­it’s—­Well it’s that kind of a nose that—­”

“Now Eleanor!—­the woman is not responsible for her nose—­” and so-on and so-on.  It didn’t seem to me that I had any right to be having this feast and you not there.

She convinced me before she got through, that she and William James are right—­hypnotism and mind-cure are the same thing; no difference between them.  Very well; the very source, the very center of hypnotism is Paris.  Dr. Charcot’s pupils and disciples are right there and ready to your hand without fetching poor dear old Susy across the stormy sea.  Let Mrs. Mackay (to whom I send my best respects), tell you whom to go to to learn all you need to learn and how to proceed.  Do, do it, honey.  Don’t lose a minute.

.....At 11 o’clock last night Mr. Rogers said: 

“I am able to feel physical fatigue—­and I feel it now.  You never show any, either in your eyes or your movements; do you ever feel any?”

I was able to say that I had forgotten what that feeling was like.  Don’t you remember how almost impossible it was for me to tire myself at the Villa?  Well, it is just so in New York.  I go to bed unfatigued at 3, I get up fresh and fine six hours later.  I believe I have taken only one daylight nap since I have been here.