III

Summary

I DID on the morrow several things, but the first was not to redeem that vow. It was to address myself straight to Grace Brissenden. “I must let you know that, in spite of your guarantee, it doesn't go at all—oh, but not at all! I’ve tried Lady John, as you enjoined, and I can't but feel that she leaves us very much where we were.” Then, as my listener seemed not quite to remember where we had been, I came to her help. “You said yesterday at Paddington, to explain the change in Gilbert Long—don't you recall?—that that woman, plying him with her genius and giving him of her best, is clever enough for two. She's not clever enough then, it strikes me, for three—or at any rate for four. I confess I don't see it. Does she really dazzle you?”

My friend had caught up. “Oh, you’ve a standard of wit!”

“No, I’ve only a sense of reality—a sense not at all satisfied by the theory of such an influence as Lady John’s.”

She wondered. “Such a one as whose else then?”

“Ah, that's for us still to find out! Of course this can't be easy; for as the appearance is inevitably a kind of betrayal, it's in somebody's interest to conceal it.”

This Mrs. Brissenden grasped. “Oh, you mean in the lady’s?”

“In the lady's most. But also in Long's own, if he's really tender of the lady—which is precisely what our theory posits.”

My companion, once roused, was all there. “I see. You call the appearance a kind of betrayal because it points to the relation behind it.”

“Precisely.”

“And the relation—to do that sort of thing—must be necessarily so awfully intimate.”

“Intimissima.”

“And kept therefore in the background exactly in that proportion.”

“Exactly in that proportion.”

“Very well then,” said Mrs. Brissenden, “doesn't Mr. Long's tenderness of Lady John quite fall in with what I mentioned to you?”

I remembered what she had mentioned to me. “His making her come down with poor Briss?”

“Nothing less.”

“And is that all you go upon?”

“That and lots more.”