"A lighter view!" repeated Croucher, goggling; and he added with a shuddering inconsequence: "The lor o' the land don't make light of it!"
"Literature has been known to," rejoined the doctor, with as little apparent point. "But you are not the reader you were last year; otherwise there's a little thing, On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, that I should like to lend you."
"One o' the 'ow much?" said Mr. Croucher, uncertain whether to grin, or frown, and meanwhile glaring more than he supposed.
Dollar went for the book, and read a few extracts aloud. They appeared to afford him extraordinary enjoyment; they were altogether over the bullet head on the pillow. Croucher could only gather that some people seemed to imagine it was good sport to commit a murder. Funny fools! Let them try a fortnight in the condemned cell, for one they never did commit, and see how they took to that!
But he could understand them that knew nothing about it writing a lot of rot like this; what beat him was that the crime doctor, of all people, and with all his uncanny knowledge of the subject, that even he was able to view the worst of crimes in a light which would never have dawned on the independent intellect of Alfred Croucher. It seemed to him a more lurid light than any in which he himself, at his worst, had ever seen such things; horrible, to his mind, that one who ran every risk of being murdered should sit there gloating over "the shades of merit" in one murder, and over others as "the sublimest and most entire in their excellence that ever were committed." What was more horrible, however, was the hollow note of Mr. Croucher's own laughter, and the furtive gleaming of his restless eyes, while his body twitched between the sheets.
He asked for the book when Dollar rose to go; and was discovered, in due course, bathed in a perspiration which he made less effort to conceal.
"It ain't all like them funny bits," he assured the doctor, with an open shudder. "There's a bit I struck about a servant gal, on one side of a door, an' a bloke wot's done the 'ole bloomin' family in on the other. My cripes! I 'ad to 'old me breff over that, and it's made me sweat like a pig."
"On which side of the door were you?"
"Wot's that?"
"In your mind's eye, my good fellow!"