"Well, there's an excuse. Last night, you see, there were six of us to dinner. Vicky, and this swine Fane— I know I oughtn't to talk about my host like that, but he is a swine and that's all there is to it — and Fane's uncle, and a wishy-washy gal named Ann Browning, and a doctor, and myself. This doctor is one of the kind (what do you call 'em?) who tells you when you've got complexes."
"Psychiatrist?"
"That's it! Psychiatrist. Rich, his name is! Dr. Rich. Well, this Dr. Rich, who's a genial old buffer like John Bull and looks as though he'd got no nonsense about him, started talking about his work. In the course of it he said that he very often used hypnotism."
"Used what?"
"Hypnotism," explained Sharpless, making mesmeric passes in the air by way of illustration. "Yes?"
"Now, that interested me. I've always thought it was a good deal of a fake. That's to say: I've seen 'em on the stage, where they fetch somebody up out of the audience and make him quack like a duck. But there always seemed to me something very, very phoney about it."
"There's nothing phoney about it, Frank."
"No. That's what Rich told me, and they all backed him up. I'm afraid I got a bit argumentative. I said I didn't maintain it couldn't be done; I said all I maintained was that I should like to see it done where there was no possibility of a fake.
"I said, furthermore, 'Suppose you could put a person under hypnotic influence like that, so that he or she was absolutely controlled by your will, would that person do anything you ordered?' I was thinking of the dangers of it, you see. I said, 'For instance, could you get a girl to do thus-and-so?' "
Sharpless paused.