Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. A FAMILY POLYGON. Mrs. Grubb's family circle was really not a circle at all; it was rather a polygon, — a curious assemblage of distinct personages. There was no unity in it, no membership one of another. It was four ones, not one four. If some gatherer of statistics had visited the household, he might have described it thus: — "Mrs. S. Cora Grubb, widow, aged forty years. "Alisa Bennett, feeble-minded, aged ten or twelve years. "Atlantic and Pacific Simonson, twins, aged four years." The man of statistics might seek in vain for some principle of attraction or cohesion between these independent elements; but no one who knew Mrs. Grubb would have been astonished at the sort of family that had gathered itself about her. Queer as itundoubtedly was at this period, it had at various times been infinitely queerer. There was a certain memorable month, shortly after her husband's decease, when Mrs. Grubb allowed herself to be considered as a compensated hostess, though the terms "landlady" and "boarder" were never uttered in her hearing. She hired a Chinese cook, who slept at home, cleared out for the use of Lisa and the twins a small storeroom in which she commonly kept Eldorado face powder, and herself occupied a sofa in the apartment of a friend of humanity in the next street. These arrangements enabled her to admit an experimenter on hypnotism, a mental healer who had been much abused by the orthodox members of her cult and was evolving a method of her own, an ostensible delegate to an Occidental Conference of Religions, and a lady agent for a flexible celluloid undershirt. For a few days Mrs. Grubb found the society of these persons very stimulating and agreeable, but before long the hypnotist proved to be an unscrupulous gentleman who hypnotized the mental ...