"Well, you'd 'a' noticed," said Rosalie, covering up quickly. "The gentleman I don't want to see has a club foot--show him up, dearie."
As Madame Le Grange sat down by the wicker center table and composed her features to professional calm, she was thinking:
"If he's a new sitter, I'll have to stall. There's nothing as hard to bite into as a young man dope."
The expected knock came. Entered the new sitter--him whom we know as Dr. Walter Huntington Blake, but a stranger to Rosalie. During the formal preliminaries--in which Dr. Blake stated simply that he wanted a sitting and expressed himself as willing to pay two dollars for full trance control--Rosalie studied him and mapped her plan of action. There was, indeed, "nothing to bite into." His shapely clothes bore neither fraternity pin nor society button; his face was comparatively inexpressive; to her attempts at making him chatter, he returned but polite nothings. Only one thing did she "get" before she assumed control. When she made him hold hands to "unite magnetisms," his finger rested for a moment on the base of her palm. She put that little detail aside for further reference, and slid gently into "trance," making the most, as she assumed the slumber pose, of her profile, her plump, well-formed arms, her slender hands. This sitter was "refined"; not for him the groans and contortions of approaching control which so impressed factory girls and shopkeepers.
Peeping through her long eyelashes, she noted that his face, while turned upon her in close attention, was without visible emotion.
"I must fish," she thought as she began the preliminary gurgles which heralded the coming of Laughing Eyes, her famous Indian child control--"I wonder if I've got to tell him that the influence won't work to-day and I can't get anything? Maybe I'd better."
A long silence, broken here and there by guttural gurglings; then Laughing Eyes babbled tentatively:
"John--Will--Will--" she choked here, as though trying to add a syllable which she could not clearly catch. And at this point, Rosalie took another look through her eyelashes. She had touched something! He was leaning forward; his mouth had opened. Before she could follow up her advantage, he had thrown himself wide open.