"She had, poor little woman. But what was she? When I realised ... when I knew..."
They sat now in a circle of dark. The room was nearly empty; the rain had grown to a torrent and lashed the windows furiously.
"Well, I couldn't help taking stock of the thing, and it looked odd, anyway you looked at it. I remembered that the reason I got the house in the first place was very much the same reason that had emptied it twice. Of course the agent remembered it, too.
"'Where's those mathematics of yours, doctor?' he asked me with a good-natured grin.
"'Stuff and nonsense!' I said to him. 'I'll get a tenant for that house, myself.'
"You see, whether or not there was any sense in it, I couldn't let that house get a bad name. There were neighbours and they will talk—they don't always know so much about mathematics as scientific men, you know!
"What a great thing it is, if one could get hold of it and use it—the collective spirit of a community! It's utilizable—or ought to be—like water power....
"There was a woman in town then, a 'mental healer,' she called herself. I'd run across her more than once and she interested me very much. She was a clever woman—sensible, too, which doesn't always follow, you know. So far as I could tell, she never handled a case she wasn't able to attend to, which may seem an odd thing for me to say, but happens to be so. I know of a dozen nervous, hysterical women—emotional spend-thrifts—that she bullied into shape and got so they could stand up without her behind them, too. They were cured, and they stayed cured. More than that, I sent more than one to her, myself!
"'Mrs. Mears,' I said, 'there's nothing the matter with these women that I can see but pure, piggish, bone-idle selfishness. I haven't got the courage to tell 'em so; if you have, and the long words you use disguise the fact sufficiently, go ahead and cure 'em, and God bless you!'
"'Thank you, doctor,' she said, and she cured 'em. They had no use for me after that. No, indeed—they told my wife they'd found a higher law and that calomel was sinful. But the poor old calomel wasn't so bad for 'em, after all, maybe.