Dance of the Happy Shades

weekend?”
    “I’m not travelling on business right now,” the man said. “At least I’m not travelling on rug business. You might say I’m travelling on private business.”
    “Oh well,” the old woman said, in the tone of one who does not meddle with anybody’s private business. “Does it look to you like we’re going to have a rain?”
    “Could be,” the man said. He took a big drink of lemon-lime and put the bottle down and wiped his mouth neatly with his handkerchief. He was the sort who would talk about his private business anyway; indeed he would not talk about anything else. “I’m on my way to see an acquaintance of mine, he’s staying at his summer cottage,” he said. “He has insomnia so bad he hasn’t had a good night’s rest in seven years.”
    “Oh well,” the old woman said.
    “I’m going to see if I can cure him of it. I’ve had pretty good success with some insomnia cases. Not one hundred per cent. Pretty good.”
    “Are you a medical man too?”
    “No, I’m not,” the little man said agreeably. “I’m a hypnotist. An amateur. I don’t think of myself as anything but an amateur.”
    The old woman looked at him for several moments without saying anything. This did not displease him; he moved around the front of the store picking things up and looking at them in a lively and self-satisfied way. “I’ll bet you never saw anybody that said he was a hypnotist before in your life,” he said in a joking way to the old woman. “I look just like anybody else, don’t I? I look pretty tame.”
    “I don’t believe in any of that kind of thing,” she said.
    He just laughed. “What do you mean you don’t
believe
in it?”
    “I don’t believe in any superstitious kind of thing.”
    “It’s not superstition, lady, it’s a living fact.”
    “I know what it is.”
    “Well now a lot of people are of your opinion, a surprising lot of people. Maybe you didn’t happen to read an article that was published about two years ago in the
Digest
on this same subject? I wish I had it with me,” he said. “All I know is I cured a man of drinking. I cured people of all sorts of itches and rashes and bad habits. Nerves. I don’t claim I can cure everbody of their nervous habits but some people I can tell you have been very grateful to me. Very grateful.”
    The old woman put her hands up to her head and did not answer.
    “What’s the matter, lady, aren’t you feeling well. You got a headache?”
    “I feel all right.”
    “How did you cure those people?” May said boldly, thoughher grandmother had always told her: don’t let me catch you talking to strangers in the store.
    The little man swung round attentively. “Why I hypnotize them, young lady. I hypnotize them. Are you asking me to explain to you what hypnotism is?”
    May who did not know what she was asking flushed red and had no idea what to say. She saw her grandmother looking straight at her. The old woman looked out of her head at May and the whole world as if they had caught fire and she could do nothing about it, she could not even communicate the fact to them.
    “She don’t know what she’s talking about,” her grandmother said.
    “Well it’s very simple,” the man said directly to May, in a luxuriantly gentle voice he must think suitable for children. “It’s just like you put a person to sleep. Only they’re not really asleep, do you follow me honey? You can talk to them. And listen—listen to this—you can go way deep into their minds and find out things they wouldn’t even remember when they were awake. Find out their hidden worries and anxieties that’s causing them the trouble. Now isn’t that an amazing thing?”
    “You couldn’t do that with me,” the old woman said. “I would know what was going on. You couldn’t do that with me.”
    “I bet he could,” May said, and was so startled at herself her mouth stayed open. She did not know why she had said that. Time and again she had watched her grandmother’s encounters with the outside world, not with pride so much as a solid, fundamental conviction that the old woman would get the better of it. Now for the first time it seemed to her she saw the possibility of her grandmother’s defeat; in her grandmother’s face she saw it and not in the little man who must be crazy, she thought, and who made her want to laugh. The idea filled her with dismay and with a painful, irresistible excitement.
    “Well you never can tell till you give