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Imagine her hand lax and pink against the linen of the crib. Who she is, what she will be, is written there in that moist palm as plainly as in any book. Many years later, one sultry afternoon in Paris, the palmist and psychic Desbarolles, who said so many interesting things to her, was the first to interpret a very pronounced line that ran from her Lifeline and ended in a fork or trident under the little finger. “Madame,” the palmist explained, “you will write the most celebrated memoirs of the century, and at the same time, useful.” He repeated this word to her several times, an instance, if any were needed, of his amazing powers. For had she not already begun these memoirs? The word “useful” rang like a gong in the stuffy room. It was exactly the adjective she herself would have chosen. The nineteenth century had done her wrong, not because she was a ninny, but because she was a woman of genius in a man’s world. There was a vital subtext. The very people who ought to have championed her, her parents, the aristocracy to which she believed she belonged, had cast her aside. Her class had betrayed her. Another palmist, Madame de Thèbes, had also studied the curious branchings and forkings and came up with a different reading, but one that brought the story nearer to home. It was clear to her, she said, before giving Georgina back her mitten, that what the hand indicated was that she would most assuredly be divested of her £27,000 inheritance—if that had not already happened. The glorious thing about palmistry was that both statements were true, one not less than the other.