Peggy checked her impulse to laugh. The thing might seem a joke to her, but it was serious enough to Amy. Her loss of flesh, and even more the haunted look in her eyes, was proof of that.
"Tell me all about it," she said soothingly, and Amy closed with her offer so hastily as to suggest that all she had wanted was a chance.
"She's a woman on West Spring Street, Madame Planchet. Lots of girls go there to get their fortunes told, just for the fun of the thing. One day Blanche Estabrook and I were going past, when she suggested that we should stop. Madame Planchet only charges a quarter."
"That's cheap, considering what she gives you," observed Peggy with an irony that glanced harmlessly from her friend's armor.
"Of course neither of us took it a bit seriously," Amy explained. "We were both laughing when we went in and all the time Blanche was having her fortune told I fairly stuffed my handkerchief into my mouth, I giggled so. Blanche's fortune didn't sound a bit true, you know. It was all about coming into a lot of money, and that she was going to have a serious sickness when she was about twenty, but she'd recover and be a lot healthier after that. And I supposed mine would be just the same. But it wasn't."
"Go on!" Peggy prompted impatiently, for poor Amy paused, as if she found it difficult to disclose to another the black page of the future so unexpectedly revealed to herself.
"Well, she looked at my hand a minute, and then she said, 'I can't tell your fortune. There is nothing to tell.' I was so stupid that I didn't understand for a minute. I thought she only meant that there wouldn't be much doing in my life, you know. And I asked her if I wasn't going to get married. I thought fortune tellers married everybody off. And then she said in a dreadful voice, 'You have no future,' and I began to understand."
"Poor Amy! To pay a quarter for that!" Peggy cried, but Amy refused to smile.
"I asked her how long I was likely to live, and she said it wasn't possible to be exact. It might be six months, and it might be a little more. She was sure I shouldn't live out the year." Amy paused a moment before she added, "And one month has gone already."
"O, you goose!" cried Peggy. "You dear silly goose! Don't you see how perfectly absurd it all is?" She launched into arguments convincing to herself, but useless as far as Amy was concerned. More profound logicians than Peggy long ago discovered the hopelessness of mere reason when confronted with a well-grounded superstition.