“Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical,” said Rupert contemptuously, “be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance, that he has lived all his life in one ancestral manor.”
“No, he's extremely fond of change of scene,” replied Basil dispassionately, “and of living in odd places. That doesn't prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people don't understand is that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of things Keith recounts are not the sort of things that a man would make up to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they are the sort of things that a man would do if he were sufficiently filled with the soul of skylarking.”
“So far from paradox,” said his brother, with something rather like a sneer, “you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?”
“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction,” said Basil placidly. “For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.”
“Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than anything I ever heard of,” said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy. “Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the camera?”
“I believe Keith's words,” answered the other. “He is an honest man.”
“I should like to question a regiment of his landladies,” said Rupert cynically.
“I must say, I think you can hardly regard him as unimpeachable merely in himself,” I said mildly; “his mode of life—”
Before I could complete the sentence the door was flung open and Drummond Keith appeared again on the threshold, his white Panama on his head.
“I say, Grant,” he said, knocking off his cigarette ash against the door, “I've got no money in the world till next April. Could you lend me a hundred pounds? There's a good chap.”