"The one and only woman," said Van Dyck musingly, taking up the thread of the table talk at the point where it had been broken by the shifting of plates. "That is another exploded fallacy, Preble. There are dozens of the 'one-and-onlys,' each with a scheming mamma, or a grafting father, or an impecunious guardian who has been thriftlessly making ducks and drakes of his ward's trust funds. And they are all so immitigably decent and well-behaved and conventional that butter wouldn't melt in the mouth of a single one of them. They never, by any chance, let you see one-sixty-fourth of an inch below the surface."
"I grant you surfaces are more or less deceptive," I admitted. "But your charge is too sweeping. You can't lump humanity any more than you can the stars in heaven."
"Can't I? Wait and you shall see. And it isn't altogether what you are thinking; that I have been 'touched' so often that it has soured me. Heaven knows I've been a perfect Pool of Bethesda to a whole worldful of financial cripples ever since I left the university; but I don't especially mind the graft. What I do mind is the fact that it makes smiling hypocrites out of the grafters, big and little. Not one of them dares show me his real self, and there are times when I am fairly sick at heart for one little refreshing glimpse of humanity in the raw."
"Which is more piffle," I commented. "You didn't cable me to come and eat a New Orleans dinner with you on the bare chance that I'd let you work off a batch of grouches on me, did you?"
His answer was delayed so long that I wondered if he were trying to determine beforehand how much or how little he might be obliged to tell me. But finally he broke ground, rather cautiously, I thought, in the field of the explanations.
"No; I didn't ask you for the purpose of unloading my peculiar and personal grievances upon you, tempting as that may have been. I have a deep-laid plot, and I want you to help me carry it out. It is just about the maddest thing you ever heard of, and I've got to have at least one sane man along—as a sort of sea-anchor to tie to when the hurricane begins ripping the masts out of us, and all that."
"In other words, you are out to pick up a bit of moral backing for the plot. Is that it?"
"You have hit it precisely. You are to go along and hold me up to the mark, Dick. If I show any signs of weakening, you are to jab a knife into me and twist it around a few times. You are on salary, you know—if you care to have it that way."
"If you say money to me again, I quit you cold, right here and now," was my answer to that. And then: "Pitch out and tell me: what is this piratical scheme that you are afraid you may not have the nerve to carry through?"
The plotter sat back in his chair, regarding me through half-closed eyelids; and again I thought I caught the dark-faced foreigner two tables distant stealthily watching him.