"Only a little," I confessed modestly. "Just enough to——"
I don't quite know how it happened. There was a sort of flank and rear movement and the entire company, excepting, of course, the dank spiritualist, precipitated itself on me. Voices clamoured for me to foretell destinies. Hands were thrust before me. They eddied, surged and swirled about me. I never saw such a massed quantity of hands. It was like leaving a Swiss hotel in the height of the season.
"One at a time, please," I said limply.
I seized a palm, followed it up, and found that it belonged to a pinched sour-looking female. Her character was stamped on her face as well as on her hand. If, however, I had said to her, "Yours is a flaccid repressed disposition you have a lack of imagination and a total absence of humour; your life is too narrow and self-centred to be of the least interest to anyone," she might not have liked it. You see, with even a slight knowledge of palmistry you soon find out when reading hands that it's no use telling people the truth. They want a version which I can only describe as "garbled."
Accordingly I bent over the repressed female's hand with an air of profundity and said, "There being a total absence of the mounts of Mercury and the Sun, a calm and even nature is indicated." (You're nearly always safe in saying this.) "Your sense of order and of the fitness of things would not allow you to see any fun in the joke of, say, pulling away a chair from anyone about to sit down. In fact you would not see a joke in anything—like that," I added hastily, and gave her hand back, feeling I had made the best of a bad job.
But she still lingered.
"Does it show if I shall——?" She paused in embarrassment.
"Get married?" I asked, knowing human nature better than palmistry.
She looked so fiercely eager, with such a vivid light of hope in her eye, that I decided to award her a husband on the spot.
"The Hepatica line, being allied to the line of Fate," I said impressively "signifies that you will marry—late in life."