“Duparc taught me French, and I knew I was learning, but I had another teacher from whom I learned without knowing. Almost everything of great value I have learned in life has been taught me by women. The woman who taught me the realities of hypnotism was Mrs Constantinescu, a strange old girl who travelled around with our show for a few years, running a mitt-camp.

“It was not part of the World of Wonders; it was a concession which Jerry rented, as he rented the right to run a hot-dog stand, a Wheel of Fortune, the cat-rack and, of course, the merry-go-round. The mitt-camp was a fortune-telling tent, with a gaudy banner outside with the signs of the zodiac on it, and an announcement that inside Zingara would reveal the Secrets of Fate. Mrs Constantinescu was Zingara, and for all I know she may have been a real gypsy, as she claimed; certainly she was a good fortune-teller. Not that she would ever admit such a thing. Fortune-telling is against the law in just about every part of Canada and the U.S. When her customers came in she would sell them a copy of Zadkiel’s Dream Book for ten cents, and offer a personal interpretation for a further fifteen cents, and a full-scale investigation of your destiny for fifty cents, Zadkiel included. Thus it was possible for her to say that she was simply selling a book, if any nosey cop interfered with her. They very rarely did so, because it was the job of our advance man to square the cops with money, bootleg hooch, or whatever their fancy might be. Her customers never complained. Zingara knew how to deliver the goods.

“She liked me, and that was a novelty. She was sorry for me, and except for Professor Spencer, nobody had been sorry for me in a very long time. But what made her really unusual in the World of Wonders was that she was interested in people; the Talent regarded the public as Rubes, to be exploited, and whether it was Willard’s kind of exploitation or Happy Hannah’s, it came to the same thing. But Zingara never tired of humanity or found it a nuisance. She enjoyed telling fortunes and truly thought that she did good by it.

“ ‘Most people have nobody to talk to,’ she said to me many times. ‘Wives and husbands don’t talk; friends don’t really talk because people don’t want to get mixed up in anything that might cost them something in the end. Nobody truly wants to hear anybody else’s worries and troubles. But everybody has worries and troubles and they don’t cover a big range of subjects. People are much more like one another than they are unlike. Did you ever think of that?

“ ‘Well? So I am somebody to talk to. I’ll talk, and I’ll be gone in the morning, and everything I know goes away with me. I don’t look like the neighbours. I don’t look like the doctor or the preacher, always judging, always tired. I’ve got mystery, and that’s what everybody wants. Maybe they’re church-goers, the people in these little dumps, but what does the church give them? Just sermons from some poor sap who doesn’t understand life any more than they do; they know him, and his salary, and his wife, and they know he’s no great magician. They want to talk, and they want the old mystery, and that’s what I give ’em. A good bargain.’