They followed the crowd and the clomp of wooden shoes to the meat market at the center of the town. Here, in the big hall, benches—rough boards on trestles—had been arranged and the Professor himself stood at the improvised ticket window.
“Shall we be extravagant and take a two-franc ticket? Then we can sit in the front row,” suggested Nancy.
“Let’s,” urged Cynthia. “What fun to have eight cents buy so much luxury.”
The first two rows were very de luxe; benches with backs, but so hard and narrow that Cynthia was glad they had brought their coats for cushions. The children, giggling and whispering, somewhat awestruck by the promised entertainment, crowded into the seats behind them, and in the front rows sat the old ladies, some even with their knitting, very straight and stiff and impressive. There was a scuffle of sabots on the stone floor and outside a tied sheep baa-a-a-ed plaintively.
Everyone peered and craned and turned heads to see the two American mademoiselles, and discussed them in friendly fashion, but quite openly. Cynthia’s bright beret and red coat, her gray eyes and dark curls, her shoes, her silk stockings, the ring on her finger, were argued and debated ... and relayed by Nancy in a choked murmur.
“You are rich, since you wear a gold ring with a greenglass stone in it. Someone suggests that you are married, also because of the ring, but it seems Madame at the hotel has reported that you are still a ‘Mees,’ judging by your letters. Oh, here is our professor!”
M’sieu Reynaldo, who had been at once ticket taker and dispenser, usher, and frightener-away of small boys who would press their snubby noses against the windows, at last barred the doors and strode proudly up the center, and only, aisle. The stage was a rough platform on saw-horses, beneath the light of a half dozen dim, swinging lanterns, and was but a few feet from the de luxe seats occupied by Cynthia and Nancy.
“Look, Nancy; there’s my lost model, Leonie. See, there at the end. Isn’t she a darling!”
“Sh-h,” Nancy nudged her. “He’s going to begin.”
The professor’s performance began with a short talk on hypnotism, its great antiquity, its meaning, and mostly of how wonderful he was at that ancient art. How, with the supreme power of his eye and a few passes of his hands—somewhat soiled hands they were—he could control his subjects and command them, thereafter to do his bidding.