“But,” she argued, “are you a fiend doing all this for the delight of deceiving for deception’s sake? Are you a man wealthy by inheritance and choosing this form of activity for the pleasure it gives you?” “By no means Madame,” he denied, “I live by my wits.” “Your surroundings tell me that you live well,” she suggested. “Better than my surroundings reveal,” he rejoined. “Then your wits are good wits,” she ventured. “None better of their kind on earth,” he naïvely admitted, wholly off his guard. “And they are not overtaxed?” she asked. “Deception is not hard,” he told her, “the world is full of fools and even the sensible are easy to deceive.” “From what I have read,” she continued, “you do not deceive. Your advice is good. Your precepts guide your clients right. Your suggestions lead to success. Your predictions come to pass, your conjectures are verified.” “All that is true enough,” he allowed. “Then how can you call your clients dupes, your methods mummeries, your answers lies?” She wound up triumphantly. “I did not call my answers lies,” he disclaimed. “Mummeries I deal in and to dupes. Dupes they are all. They pour gold into my lap to tell them what they already knew if they but reasoned it out calmly with themselves. They babble to me all they need to know and pay me insensately for it when I fling back to them a patchwork of the fragments I have extracted from their stories of expectations, apprehensions and memories.” “But if you do all that you must be a real judge of human nature, a genuine reader of hearts, a keen-brained counsellor.” “I am all that and more,” he bragged. He had lost every trace of agitation and bore himself with a dashing self-confidence of manner, extremely engaging. “I cannot minister to a mind diseased; but I am called on to prescribe for all sorts of delusions, follies, blunders, miseries and griefs. I could count by thousands the men and women I have saved, the lives I have made happy, the difficulties I have annihilated, the aspirations I have guided aright.” “Then you must have an immense experience of human frailties and human needs.” “Vast, enormous, incalculable,” he declared. “Your advice then should be valuable.” “It is valuable,” he boasted. “Then advise me, I am in extreme distress. I have felt that no one could help me. The belief that you might has given me a ray of hope. You have expressed a regard for me altogether extraordinary. Will it not lead you to help me?”