"Oh, she floated in. I give her a reading and found out she worked in a pickle factory down on Sixth Street where there are fifty or more girls. Soon as I found out the handle to work her by, I made her a proposition to tip off what's doing in her shop. She makes her little report, steers the girls up here, and then she comes round and tells me who they are and all about 'em."
"That's what I call a good wholesale business," said Vixley enviously. "I wish I could work it as slick as that. She uses the peek-hole in the screen, I suppose?"
"Sometimes, and sometimes she sits behind the window curtain up-stairs."
"You have to give yourself away, that's the only trouble," said Doctor Masterson.
"Oh, no," Madam Spoll remarked easily, "I just tell her that I can't always get everybody's magnetism, though of course I can always get hers. That gives her an idea she's important, don't you see? Then I can always lay anything suspicious to the Diakkas. Evil spirits are a great comfort."
"And anyways, if she should want to tell anything," Vixley suggested, "you can everlastingly blacklist her at the factory with what you know."
"Yes," Madam Spoll assented; "she's got a record herself, only she hasn't got sense enough to realize on it the way I do on mine. Is they any bigger fool than a girl that's in love?"
"Only a man that is," Vixley offered sagely.
"Oh, men!" she exclaimed contemptuously. "I believe they ain't more'n but three real ones alive to-day!"
The Professor's eyes snapped. "Well, they's women enough, thank the Lord!"