The tireless ingenuity with which that rampant spinster devised ways and means of rendering herself a peripatetic pest had long since won the ungrudged admiration of Sally, who elected to be amused more than annoyed by the impertinences, the pretentiousness, the fawning adulation and the corrosive jealousy of Mrs. Gosnold's licensed pick-thank. And when she had first divined the woman beneath the disguise of the witch Sally had wondered what new method of making a sprightly nuisance of herself Miss Pride had invented to go with her impersonation.
It proved, naturally enough, remembering the limitations of a New England maiden's imagination, to be compulsory fortune-telling with the aid of cards, a crystal ball, the palm of the victim's hand, unlimited effrontery, and a "den" rigged up in a corner of a hedge with a Navajo blanket for a canopy and for properties two wooden stools, a small folding table, a papier-mache skull, a jointed wooden snake, an artificial pumpkin-head with a candle in it, and a black cat tethered by a string to a stake in the ground and wishing he had never been born.
Within this noisome lair the sorceress squatted and practised her unholy arts upon all comers without mercy or distinction as to race, caste, sex, age, colour, or previous condition of servitude. And when trade slackened (as inevitably it did when "the young people" for whose "amusement" this mummery ostensibly was staged asserted their ennui by avoiding the neighbourhood) Ecstatica, nothing daunted, would rise up and go forth and stalk her prey among the more mature, dragging them off forcibly by the hand, when needs must, to sit at her table and sympathise with the unfortunate cat and humour her nonsense.
Thus she inveigled Sally when the latter unwarily wandered her way.
Miss Pride knew her victim perfectly, but for the sake of appearances kept up the semblance of mystification.
"Sit you there, my pretty," she grabbed vivaciously, two hands on Sally's shoulders urging her to rest on one of the stools. "Don't be afraid of my simple magic; the black art has nothing to do with the lore of the wise old woman. Just show me your rosy palm, and I will tell you your fortune. No, you needn't cross my palm with silver; I will ply my mystic trade and tell your future all for the sake of your pretty eyes."