Skeptics . . . claim that our evidence can't support our beliefs about the external world.

She pills herself with all sorts of herbal medicines.

Have you ever been swimming in glacial water – water turned milky blue or deep maroon by minerals and deposits seized by the glacier as it ponderously made its way across a continent? You would have been high atop a mountain, maybe in the Canadian Rockies or in Montana, where glaciers, now in retreat, still press down on the earth's crust. And it would have been in the summer – late August perhaps – the sun warm and still and bright, making you feel as if a dip in this remote glacial tarn is just what your tired body needs at this point in your day.

Its asymmetrical design, half curved, half rectangular, reflects the marquise's divided nature: female organicism joined to male geometry, a psychic hermaphroditism.