Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/254

224 but I like these rooms better in the morning."

"You will not mind, Miss Pierce," Trant answered gently, without heeding Pierce's gasp of surprise, and hiding him from the girl's sight with his body, as he saw Dr. Pierce could not restrain his emotion, "if I ask you to leave us for a little while. I have something to talk over with your guardian."

She rose, and with a bright smile left them.

"Trant! Trant!" cried Pierce.

"You will understand better, Dr. Pierce," said the psychologist, "if I explain this to you from its beginning with the fact of the 'devil's claw,' which was where I myself began this investigation.

"You remember that I overheard Ulame, the negro nurse, speak of this characteristic of Miss Pierce. You, like most educated people to-day, regarded it simply as an anæsthetic spot—curious, but without extraordinary significance. I, as a psychologist, recognized it at once as an evidence, first pointed out by the French scientist, Charcot, of a somewhat unusual and peculiar nervous disposition in your ward, Miss Iris.

"The anæsthetic spot is among the most important of several physical evidences of mental peculiarity which, in popular opinion, marked out its possessors through all ages as 'different' from other people. In some ages and countries they have been executed as witches; in others, they have been deified as saints; they have been regarded as prophets, pythonesses, sibyls, 'clairvoyants.' For in some respects their mental life is more acute than that of the mass of