All this, of course, was before I even saw the Judge, but I was getting my training, and learning how easy money could be made to come through a little fol-de-rol here and a bit of blackmail there, and introducing one class of society to another in the next place. It was easy to salve my conscience, because the old adventuress was curing many a poor sleepless or rheumatic creature who could spend money like dirt to get the result, and besides, she took an interest in me enough to make me wonder why, and she was always keeping her eyes open like a pilot to see that I didn't meet any man who might be after me. To tell the truth, she talked so much of the villainy of males and the horrors of marriage that finally I believed what she said and turned my young face away from all men, just as if good, timid, and bad were run out of the same mould. We were in Paris when she showed her hand, and, strange enough, she chose to do it one afternoon when we were driving in the Bois with a thousand fine gowns and faces to distract the attention. "The trouble, Margaret," says she, "is that our reputation runs on ahead of us. Here in Paris it is the same as at Vienna and Rome--we have much more than we can attend to. I can't put my hands on two fools at once, and I am always pained because I am American by birth, as I never yet told you before, and I hate to see five dollars slip by, as we say over there." "It's too bad," I answers, "for there is no way to help it." "Indeed!" she says. "I'm not so sure. I haven't made you my daughter for nothing. And I'm thinking of having you treat those who I can't." "Me!" I cries, very surprised. "You know well enough that I have no power." At this she leaned back on the cushions and nearly put her broadness on Midget, her toy lap-dog, sitting beside her. But she threw her head back and laughed her own natural laugh, as coarse as a fishmonger's and different from the ripples she could give when anybody was around. "Power?" says she. "Child alive! I have no power, you simple girl. When I put my fingers on their silly heads, my hands might as well be resting on a sawdust pincushion in the Sahara Desert." "But the cures?" says I, looking to see if the _cocher_ could overhear us. That question brought the laugh away from her, and for a minute she looked serious. "Many a time, when I go to sleep of nights, I think of that myself," she says, patting my hand. "I actually know no more of the reason for those cures than you. Nevertheless I know surely enough it's not me that cures them. No. I think it's their own wills. A bit of claptrap fools them into exerting their own minds on their bodies, and by the same token the fear of weakness will make the weakness itself. So the world rolls around, my dear."