The Complete Man closed the door and descended the stairs. Well, well, he said to himself; well, well. He put his hand in his coat pocket and took out the card. In the dim light of the staircase he read the name on it with some difficulty. Mrs. James—but no, but no. He read again, straining his eyes; there was no question of it. Mrs. James Shearwater.
Mrs. James Shearwater.
That was why he had vaguely known the name of Bloxam Gardens.
Mrs. James Shear——. Step after step he descended, ponderously. “Good Lord,” he said out loud. “Good Lord.”
But why had he never seen her? Why did Shearwater never produce her? Now he came to think of it, he hardly ever spoke of her.
Why had she said the flat wasn’t theirs? It was; he had heard Shearwater talk about it.
Did she make a habit of this sort of thing!
Could Shearwater be wholly unaware of what she was really like? But, for that matter, what was she really like?
He was half-way down the last flight, when with a rattle and a squeak of hinges the door of the house, which was only separated by a short lobby from the foot of the stairs, opened, revealing, on the doorstep, Shearwater and a friend, eagerly talking.
“... I take my rabbit,” the friend was saying—he was a young man with dark, protruding eyes, and staring, doggy nostrils; very eager, lively and loud. “I take my rabbit and I inject into it the solution of eyes, pulped eyes of another dead rabbit. You see?”