Harcutt threw his cigarette into the fire with an impatient gesture.
“You may think so,” he said. “All I can say is, that if you had been there yourself, you could have done no more. At any rate, we have no particular difficulty now in finding out who this mysterious Mr. Sabin and the girl are. We may assume that there is a relationship,” he added, “or they would scarcely have been at the Embassy, where, as a rule, the guests make up in respectability what they lack in brilliancy.”
“As to the relationship,” Wolfenden said, “I am quite prepared to take that for granted. I, for one, never doubted it.”
“That,” Harcutt remarked, “is because you are young, and a little quixotic. When you have lived as long as I have you will doubt everything. You will take nothing for granted unless you desire to live for ever amongst the ruins of your shattered enthusiasms. If you are wise, you will always assume that your swans are geese until you have proved them to be swans.”
“That is very cheap cynicism,” Wolfenden remarked equably. “I am surprised at you, Harcutt. I thought that you were more in touch with the times. Don’t you know that to-day nobody is cynical except schoolboys and dyspeptics? Pessimism went out with sack overcoats. Your remarks remind me of the morning odour of patchouli and stale smoke in a cheap Quartier Latin dancing-room. To be in the fashion of to-day, you must cultivate a gentle, almost arcadian enthusiasm, you must wear rose-coloured spectacles and pretend that you like them. Didn’t you hear what Flaskett said last week? There is an epidemic of morality in the air. We are all going to be very good.”
“Some of us,” Densham remarked, “are going to be very uncomfortable, then.”
“Great changes always bring small discomforts,” Wolfenden rejoined. “But after all I didn’t come here to talk nonsense. I came to ask you both something. I want to know whether you fellows are bent upon seeing this thing through?”
Densham and Harcutt exchanged glances. There was a moment’s silence. Densham became spokesman.
“So far as finding out who they are and all about them,” he said, “I shall not rest until I have done it.”