“Pretty much,” she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke. “But I didn’t see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling,” I said. She had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her husband’s,--but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house. “The housekeeping is enough,” she answered, with her tranquil smile. There was nothing in her smile that was leading, and I did not push my inquiry, especially as Alderling did not seem disposed to assist. “Well,” I said, “I suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that your situation is most suggestive.” “Oh, don’t mind _us!_” said Alderling. “I won’t, thank you,” I answered. “Why, it’s equal to being cast away together on an uninhabited island.” “Quite,” he assented. “There can’t,” I went on, “be a corner of your minds that you haven’t mutually explored. You must know each other,” I cast about for the word, and added abruptly, “by heart.” “I don’t suppose he meant anything pretty?” said Alderling, with a look up over his shoulder at his wife; and then he said to me, “We do; and there are some very curious things I could tell you, if Marion would ever let me get in a word.” “Do let him, Mrs. Alderling,” I entreated, humoring his joke at her silence. She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed. “I could make your flesh creep,” he went on, “or I could if you were not a psychologist. I assure you that we are quite weird at times.” “As how?” “Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a given moment, and saying it. There are times when Marion’s thinking is such a nuisance to me, that I have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The racket it makes breaks me all up. It’s a relief to have her talk, and I try to make her, when she’s posing, just to escape the din of her thinking. Then the willing! We experimented with it, after we had first noticed it, but we don’t any more. It’s too dead easy.” “What do you mean by the willing?” I asked. “Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and there he or she is.” “Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling?” I appealed to her, and she answered from her calm: “It is very unaccountable.” “Then you really mean it! Why can’t you give me an illustration?”