"Why, to the investigator. Resting on the _kind_ of signs that the game
takes account of when fairly played--resting on psychologic signs alone,
it's a high application of intelligence. What's ignoble is the detective
and the keyhole."
"I see," I after a moment admitted. "I did have, last night, my
scruples, but you warm me up. Yet I confess also," I still added, "that
if I do muster the courage of my curiosity, it's a little because I feel
even yet, as I think you also must, altogether destitute of a material
clue. If I had a material clue I should feel ashamed: the fact would be
deterrent. I start, for my part, at any rate, quite in the dark--or in a
darkness lighted, at best, by what you have called the torch of my
analogy. The analogy too," I wound up, "may very well be only half a
help. It was easy to find poor Briss, because poor Briss is here, and
it's always easy, moreover, to find a husband. But say Mrs. Server's
poor Briss--or his equivalent, whoever it may be--_isn't_ here."
We had begun to walk away with this, but my companion pulled up at the
door of the room. "I'm sure he is. She tells me he's near."
"'Tells' you?" I challenged it, but I uncomfortably reflected that it
was just what I had myself told Mrs. Brissenden.
"She wouldn't be as she is if he weren't. Her being as she is is the
sign of it. He wasn't present--that is he wasn't present in her life at
all--when I painted her; and the difference we're impressed with is
exactly the proof that he is now."
My difficulty in profiting by the relief he had so unconsciously
afforded me resided of course in my not feeling free to show for quite
as impressed as he was. I hadn't really made out at all what he was
impressed _with_, and I should only have spoiled everything by inviting
him to be definite. This was a little of a worry, for I should have
liked to know; but on the other hand I felt my track at present
effectually covered. "Well, then, grant he's one of us. There are more
than a dozen of us--a dozen even with you and me and Brissenden counted
out. The hitch is that we're nowhere without a primary lead. As to
Brissenden there _was_ the lead."
"You mean as afforded by his wife's bloated state, which was a
signal----?"
"Precisely: for the search for something or other that would help to
explain it. Given his wife's bloated state, his own shrunken one was
what was to have been predicated. I knew definitely, in other words,
what to look for."
"Whereas we don't know here?"
"Mrs. Server's state, unfortunately," I replied, "is not bloated."
He laughed at my "unfortunately," though recognising that I spoke merely
from the point of view of lucidity, and presently remarked that he had
his own idea. He didn't say what it was, and I didn't ask, intimating
thereby that I held it to be in this manner we were playing the game;
but I indulgently questioned it in the light of its not yet having
assisted him. He answered that the minutes we had just passed were what
had made the difference; it had sprung from the strong effect produced
on him after she came in with me. "It's but now I really see her. She
did and said nothing special, nothing striking or extraordinary; but
that didn't matter--it never does: one saw how she _is_. She's nothing
but _that_."
"Nothing but what?"
"She's all _in_ it," he insisted. "Or it's all in _her_. It comes to the
same thing."
"Of course it's all in her," I said as impatiently as I could, though
his attestation--for I wholly trusted his perception--left me so much in
his debt. "That's what we start with, isn't it? It leaves us as far as
ever from what we must arrive at."
But he was too interested in his idea to heed my question. He was
wrapped in the "psychologic" glow. "I _have_ her!"
"Ah, but it's a question of having _him_!"
He looked at me on this as if I had brought him back to a mere detail,
and after an instant the light went out of his face. "So it is. I leave
it to you. I don't care." His drop had the usual suddenness of the drops
of the artistic temperament. "Look for the last man," he nevertheless,
but with more detachment, added. "I daresay it would be he."
"The last? In what sense the last?"
"Well, the last sort of creature who could be believed of her."
"Oh," I rejoined as we went on, "the great bar to that is that such a
sort of creature as the last won't _be_ here!"
He hesitated. "So much the better. I give him, at any rate, wherever he
is, up to you."
"Thank you," I returned, "for the beauty of the present! You do see,
then, that our psychologic glow doesn't, after all, prevent the
thing----"
"From being none of one's business? Yes. Poor little woman!" He seemed
somehow satisfied; he threw it all up. "It isn't any of one's business,
is it?"
"Why, that's what I was telling you," I impatiently exclaimed, "that _I_
feel!"
V
The first thing that happened to me after parting with him was to find
myself again engaged with Mrs. Brissenden, still full of the quick
conviction with which I had left her. "It _is_ she--quite unmistakably,
you know. I don't see how I can have been so stupid as not to make it
out. I haven't your cleverness, of course, till my nose is rubbed into a
thing. But when it _is_--!" She celebrated her humility in a laugh that
was proud. "The two are off together."
"Off where?"
"I don't know where, but I saw them a few minutes ago most distinctly
'slope.' They've gone for a quiet, unwatched hour, poor dears, out into
the park or the gardens. When one knows it, it's all there. But what's
that vulgar song?--'You've got to know it first!' It strikes me, if you
don't mind my telling you so, that the way _you_ get hold of things is
positively uncanny. I mean as regards what first marked her for you."
"But, my dear lady," I protested, "nothing at all first marked her for
me. She _isn't_ marked for me, first or last. It was only you who so
jumped at her."
My interlocutress stared, and I had at this moment, I remember, an
almost intolerable sense of her fatuity and cruelty. They were all
unconscious, but they were, at that stage, none the less irritating. Her
fine bosom heaved, her blue eyes expanded with her successful, her
simplified egotism. I couldn't, in short, I found, bear her being so
keen about Mrs. Server while she was so stupid about poor Briss. She
seemed to recall to me nobly the fact that _she_ hadn't a lover. No, she
was only eating poor Briss up inch by inch, but she hadn't a lover. "I
don't," I insisted, "see in Mrs. Server any of the right signs."
She looked almost indignant. "Even after your telling me that you see in
Lady John only the wrong ones?"
"Ah, but there are other women here than Mrs. Server and Lady John."
"Certainly. But didn't we, a moment ago, think of them all and dismiss
them? If Lady John's out of the question, how can Mrs. Server possibly
_not_ be in it? We want a fool----"
"Ah, _do_ we?" I interruptingly wailed.
"Why, exactly by your own theory, in which you've so much interested me!
It was you who struck off the idea."
"That we want a fool?" I felt myself turning gloomy enough. "Do we
really want anyone at all?"
She gave me, in momentary silence, a strange smile. "Ah, you want to
take it back now? You're sorry you spoke. My dear man, you may be----"
but that didn't hinder the fact, in short, that I had kindled near me a
fine, if modest and timid, intelligence. There did remain the truth of
our friend's striking development, to which I had called her attention.
Regretting my rashness didn't make the prodigy less. "You'll lead me to
believe, if you back out, that there's suddenly someone you want to
protect. Weak man," she exclaimed with an assurance from which, I
confess, I was to take alarm, "something has happened to you since we
separated! Weak man," she repeated with dreadful gaiety, "you've been
squared!"