They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten — whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint's lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood, whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Florida afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.
"It isn't as farfetched as that," he said. "You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts."
"But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control," answered the Saint earnestly. "And it's always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts… No, Ivar, I mustn't let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psychoanalyzing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfyingly novel and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience."
"But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call 'an obvious excrescence on the human race' proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself."
"The human race," said the Saint sombrely, "is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own."
"You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected," Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed. "But," he added, "I think you will get on well with Dr. Sardon."
"Who is he?"
"A neighbour of mine. We are dining with him tonight."
Simon frowned.
"I warned you that I was travelling without any Dr.ess clothes," he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.