"You seem to be doin’ a pretty good business," he remarked, dropping his ashes carelessly upon the floor. "So-so," Madam Spoll answered. "If things go well we hope to get a new hall up on Post Street, but there ain’t nothing in tests. Straight clairvoyance is the future of _this_ business. Of course, we have to give cheap circles to draw the crowd, but it’s a lot of bother and expense and it does tire me all out. Then there’s always the trouble from the newspapers likely to come up." "Pshaw! I wouldn’t mind gettin’ into the newspapers occasionally, it’s good advertisin’. The more you’re exposed the better you get along, I believe." "’Lay low and set on your eggs’ is my motto," said the Madam. "I don’t like too much talk. I prefer to work in the dark—there’s more money in it in the long run. I don’t care if I only have a few customers; if they’re good and easy I can make all I want." "What do you bother with sealed messages for, Gert?" Professor Vixley asked. "Oh, I got to fix a lot of skeptics to-night. I can usually open the ballots right on the table easy enough behind the flowers, but I want to read a few sealed messages besides. It may help along with Payson, too." She took up an envelope numbered "275." It was saturated with alcohol. She held it to the light, and squinting at the transparent paper, she read: "’When is Susie coming home?’ Now, ain’t that a fool question? I’ll take a rise out of _her_, see if I don’t! That’s that woman who got into trouble in that poisoning case." "Say, the alcohol trick’s a pretty good stunt when you get a chance to use it! But I don’t have time for it in my business." "Yes, it’s easy enough if you use good, grain alcohol, but I wish I had an egg-tester. They save a lot of time, and you can read through four or five thicknesses of paper with ’em. Spoll, he has plenty of chance to hold out the ballots and bring ’em in to me; his coming and going ain’t noticed, because he has to fetch ’em up to the table, anyway. By the time I go on, all the smell’s faded out. If it ain’t, my handkerchief is so full of perfumery that you can’t notice anything else. I’m going to fit up my table with one o’ them glass plates with an electric flash-light underneath that I can turn on with a switch. You can read right through the envelope then. But I don’t often consent to tests like that. It deteriorates your powers. And my regular customers are usually contented to send their ballots up open and glad of the chance to get an answer. _They_ don’t want to give the spirits no trouble! Lord, I wish I had the power I had when I begun." She smiled pleasantly at her companion. "I see old Mrs. Purinton on the front row as I come in," Vixley observed, shifting his cigar labially from one corner of his mouth to the other.