"I'm goin' a long way round to get home. There's some so big that they don't have to fake. Sometimes, of course, the controls won't come to them, but they can afford to tell a sitter they can't sense nothin', because the next sitter will get the real stuff—the stuff you can't fake. Mrs. Fife is that way. I've seen her work and I know. I know just as well about Mrs. Markham, though I haven't seen her. She keeps tight shut up away from the rest of us. She never mixes. But some of us have seen her, they've passed it on.
"Mediums," added Rosalie Le Grange, after a pause, "is a set of pipe dreamers as a class, but there's one place where you can take their word like it was sworn to on the Bible. It's when they say somebody has the real thing. Because mediums is knockers, and when they pass out a bouquet, you can bet they mean it. No, young man, Mrs. Markham, if she does play a lone hand, is the real thing. But I may help you waste your money."
The young man had lost his air of cynical levity, he was regarding Rosalie Le Grange somewhat as a collector regards a new and unclassified species.
"Why?" he asked.
"Who's the greatest doctor in the world?" asked Mme. Le Grange.
"Watkins, I suppose," responded the young man.
"What'd you give for a chance to stay in his office a month and see him work? See?"
He nodded his head.
"Of course."
"I was a darned little fool when I was young," pursued Rosalie Le Grange, "an' now that I'm gettin' on in years I'm just as darned an old one. I like to take chances. See?"