"Oh yes—and favors, too, you call them?"
I could see no reason at all in the proceeding, yet I knew Kennedy too well to suppose that he had not some purpose.
The questioning thus strangely over, Kennedy withdrew, leaving Celeste more mystified than ever.
"Well," I exclaimed, "what was all that kindergarten stuff?"
"That?" he explained. "It is known to criminologists as the 'Aussage test.' Just try it sometime when you get a chance. If there are, say, fifty objects in a picture, normally a person may recall perhaps twenty of them."
"I see," I nodded. "A test of memory."
"More than that," he replied. "You remember that, at the end, I suggested that she might have overlooked something? I mentioned an object—the flowers—likely to have been on the table. They were not there, as you might have observed if you had had the picture before you. That was a test of the susceptibility to suggestion of Celeste."
By this time we were on the street and walking slowly back to the laboratory.
"She may not mean to lie deliberately," concluded Kennedy, "but I'm afraid we'll have to get along without her in getting to the bottom of this case. There were no flowers there, yet in her anxiety to please she said there were, and even went farther and added favors, which were not there. You see, before we go any farther, we know that Celeste is unreliable, to say the least."