"As to what may go on even between others still. It's a jolly idea--a
torch in the darkness; and do you know what I've done with it? I've held
it up, I don't mind telling you, to just the question of the change,
since this interests you, in Mrs. Server. If you've got your mystery
I'll be hanged if I won't have mine. If you've got your Brissendens I
shall see what I can do with _her_. You've given me an analogy, and I
declare I find it dazzling. I don't see the end of what may be done with
it. If Brissenden's paying for his wife, for her amazing second bloom,
who's paying for Mrs. Server? Isn't _that_--what do the newspapers call
it?--the missing word? Isn't it perhaps in fact just what you told me
last night you were on the track of? But don't add now," he went on,
more and more amused with his divination, "don't add now that the man's
obviously Gilbert Long--for I won't be put off with anything of the
sort. She collared him much too markedly. The real man must be one she
doesn't markedly collar."
"But I thought that what you a moment ago made out was that she so
markedly collars all of us." This was my immediate reply to Obert's
blaze of ingenuity, but I none the less saw more things in it than I
could reply to. I saw, at any rate, and saw with relief, that if he
should look on the principle suggested to him by the case of the
Brissendens, there would be no danger at all of his finding it. If,
accordingly, I was nervous for Mrs. Server, all I had to do was to keep
him on this false scent. Since it was not she who was paid for, but she
who possibly paid, his fancy might harmlessly divert him till the party
should disperse. At the same time, in the midst of these reflections,
the question of the "change" in her, which he was in so much better a
position than I to measure, couldn't help having for me its portent, and
the sense of that was, no doubt, in my next words. "What makes you think
that what you speak of was what I had in my head?"
"Well, the way, simply, that the shoe fits. She's absolutely not the
same person I painted. It's exactly like Mrs. Brissenden's having been
for you yesterday not the same person you had last seen bearing her
name."
"Very good," I returned, "though I didn't in the least mean to set you
digging so hard. However, dig on your side, by all means, while I dig on
mine. All I ask of you is complete discretion."
"Ah, naturally!"
"We ought to remember," I pursued, even at the risk of showing as too
sententious, "that success in such an inquiry may perhaps be more
embarrassing than failure. To nose about for a relation that a lady has
her reasons for keeping secret----"
"Is made not only quite inoffensive, I hold"--he immediately took me
up--"but positively honourable, by being confined to psychologic
evidence."