"I thought you were supposed to tell the—I mean, to state all the facts in a prospectus?" she said.
Quisanté sat up suddenly, leant forward, and spread his hands out. "My dear May," he replied with a smile, "the facts are stated, stated very fully."
"There's nothing about the report the Professor did give. You remember you told me about it?"
"Oh, no, he gave no report."
"Well, you called it a draft report."
"No, no, did I? That was a careless way of speaking if I did. He certainly sent me some considerations which had occurred to him at the beginning of his inquiry, but they were based on insufficient information and were purely provisional. They did not in any sense constitute a report. It would have been positively misleading to speak of them in any such way." He was growing eager, animated, almost excited.
May was not inclined to cross-examine him; she knew that he would develop his case for himself if she sat and listened.
"The whole thing was so inchoate as to be worth nothing," he went on. "We simply discarded it from our minds; we didn't let it weigh one way or the other."
"The directors didn't?" That little question she could not resist asking.
"Oh, it was never laid before them. As I tell you, Mandeville and I decided that it could not be regarded as a report, or even as an indication of Maturin's opinion. We only referred to Maturin at all because—because we wanted to be absolutely candid."