"She will be safer here than at Bart's. No one knows she's here, and there's less chance of unsavory strangers wandering in and out unobserved," my friend went on persuasively in the face of my hesitation. "I'm sure her recovery would be speeded in the heart of a normal home, as opposed to the impersonal confusion of a hospital."
"Would it be?" I asked.
"You underrate your abilities, my dear fellow. Certainly it would. And you could be eyes and ears for me when I was unable to observe the lady myself. It would be a great convenience in the case to have free access to her time.
Although not unaffected by his flattery, I was suspicious of the drift of his thinking. "I shouldn't get too carried away, Holmes," I said a little coldly. "She may be a convenient factor in the case to you, but she is also a woman in great mental distress. Any, ah, experiments you may have in mind would have to be evaluated in that light, as well as whether they would produce data for you."
"I promise you, no experiments without your medical approval. I may take it as fixed, then? There's a good fellow."
I found myself committed, and he took his leave.
With a sigh I prepared to go rouse the housemaid to make up the spare bedroom and look after the personal needs of what was now my resident patient. The lady watched my face gravely, with misgiving.
"Will I discommode your household, Doctor?" she asked abruptly. "Not at all," I answered immediately, in hearty reassurance.
"You are a gentleman, I perceive." She smiled a dry, sad smile and followed me without further comment.
***
The next morning found her improved still more in her speech and bearing, but still without any return of memory beyond the past three days. The housemaid served her breakfast in her room. Later in the morning I took the opportunity to conduct a more thorough neurological examination upon her. The results gave me food for thought. I found her reflexes and perceptions unimpaired. She could read with understanding and write, after some initial hesitation, without difficulty. Her understanding of mathematics was unhesitant and surprisingly good, from simple arithmetic through elementary calculus, but she could not remember how she had learned it. I became increasingly convinced that she had not suffered organic brain damage at all, and that the cause of her amnesia must be searched for among purely psychological factors. When not forced to engage in necessary or requested activities, she returned to her earlier quiet and withdrawn mode, not speaking unless spoken to directly.
In the course of the morning as I encountered, not for the first time, some conversational awkwardness in addressing a lady with no name, and as she objected to the appellation of Violet Sacker, I elected to christen her "Miss Smith." "Miss Smith?" her attention riveted upon the name in sudden concentration. "Miss Smith..." she repeated slowly.
"Could it be that I have hit upon your real name by accident?" I cried in astonishment.
She shook her head with a puzzled frown. "No, I don't think so," she said. "But it must be very close. Smith. Smith."
"Smithson?" I suggested. "Smithfield? Smithaven?" She fairly hissed with frustration in her hopeless effort to remember. "I don't know," she shrugged at last in defeat.
On impulse I rattled off perhaps two or three dozen women's first names, but none produced a similar feeling of familiarity, so Miss Smith she became. I found the puzzle of her identity intruding continually upon my thoughts as I made my professional rounds that afternoon. If indeed her loss of memory was hysteric and not organic in origin, then the possibility of inducing its return became feasible. The vague feeling of recognition and non-recognition to which she admitted suggested the hope that it might not be buried so very far below the surface after all. Might not a familiar stimulus bring some image glimmering up through the deep chill water in which it had been drowned? The idea was an exciting one. The only problem lay in guessing what might be a familiar stimulus to her. I thought back over what Holmes had said during our first meeting with her, which now seemed much longer ago than yesterday morning. On a sudden bright impulse I stopped in at a pawnshop on my way home and made a purchase.
Because she seemed so improved, and also to continue my observations, I had Miss Smith come down and attend supper with my wife and myself. It was not a great success, for my wife was rather nervous of her and so unable to help ease her out of her withdrawn silence, but nonetheless it produced a few new pieces of data. Her table manners were ladylike enough, suggesting that in spite of my impression of a certain roughness about her, she was not from the lower social classes. She held her knife and fork in the American manner, confirming Holmes's hypothesis of a principally American origin. She also continued to refuse wine or spirits in any form.
After dinner we withdrew to the drawing room.
"Do you play cards, Miss Smith?" inquired my wife after the initial bustle of getting settled had resolved into a silence whose length threatened to become uncomfortable.
"I don't know," replied my patient with a frown.
"Well, there's one way to find out," I said cheerily, cutting across the slight embarrassment I could see rising in my wife's cheeks at the feeling that she had committed a faux pas. I seated the ladies at the little table and dug out a card deck from the secretary desk. "If you can't remember a game, we'll teach you one," I said, handing her the deck. "See if something comes back to you."
She took the cards and held them in her hands a moment, as if weighing them. Then she cut them and began to shuffle. In spite of a certain stiffness from her injury, they whirred, blurred in her hands. A sudden grin passed over her face, like a patch of sunlight over a distant hillside on a cloudy day.
"I don't remember a game, but I remember some card tricks." She eyed my wife a moment as if sizing her up. "Place your hands upon the table," she commanded Alicia, "and I will show you the even-odd trick."
I nodded reassuringly at Alicia's questioning glance, and she placed her palms down upon the table.
"Now, pick a small, even number," my patient continued. "Two?"
"Fine. Now I will place two cards between each of your fingers. An even number, you see, between each finger-we count the thumb as a finger-of each hand. But between the last two fingers we place an odd card, one card. Now," she went on with easy, cheerful assurance, "I shall take each pair of cards from between your fingers and put them into two even piles. An even number of cards divided evenly into even piles. Now take the last card, the odd card that is left in your hand, and make one of the even piles odd."
My wife complied with a polite, bewildered smile. I suddenly realized that my nearly two decades of climbing the seventeen steps to 22IB Baker Street had not been entirely profitless for my mental faculties.
"You agree that this pile upon which you placed the last card is now odd? Now watch closely as I use my magic powers to switch the piles." She waved her hands gently and totally without effect about a foot over the two piles of cards.
"Now which pile is odd? Don't let me stampede you into anything."
Alicia frowned at her mistrustfully, then after a moment tapped the pile upon which she had placed the last card.
"Are you sure? Count them."
She counted them twice, and of course found eight cards in her "odd" pile and seven in her "even."
"How did you do that?" Alicia wailed, as I choked back a chuckle. "Ah, it's all in the mind, you know," said Miss Smith sunnily. Suddenly she frowned, looked down, and pressed her hands to her eyes.