"Well. Esther died a poor woman, but if she had left fifty thousand to—to a home for blind mulattoes, say, the first thing her nephews would have brought forward was that idea of Charley Ross."
"Brought forward?"
"To break her will. They would have said that it proved her mentally incapable."
"But it doesn't, Will, does it?"
"That's just as you see it. She wasn't incapable of looking after us and dressing mother and doing the marketing and keeping the accounts and making all her own clothes and some of ours. But if you ask me if she had a perfectly normal mind, I should have to say no."
"I see, Will."
I was extremely interested: I seemed to see, glimmering far off, what we were getting to, and it was gripping, absorbing. But I had no idea what we really were getting to—not then.
"Now, we'll take another case," he said, at another cigarette.
"I was at Lourdes last year, as you know, studying the Pilgrimage. Curious thing. Not an atom of proof, you see, that anybody was ever cured of a headache there. Not even sense enough to use the immense suggestive power that's massed there to do real good to neurasthenics and hysterics—in fact, they try to bar them. They prefer goitre, which is not cured by dirty baths, unfortunately. The people who go away from there think they were cured from this, that and the other; whole business founded on a perfectly authenticated case of dementia praecox—as much a pathological condition as gout or insomnia. I interviewed a prize case; she appeared before their bluff at a scientific council and presented affidavits of cure from consumption, a year previous. I examined her later. It was—as the man said—interesting if true, but the trouble was, it wasn't true, for she was nearly gone, then. I gave her three months, and she died, I took pains to learn, in ten weeks. Well: that was her delusion. Was she sane?"
"She was misinformed—mistaken."