“Oh, dear no. Left that months ago. He got some money. No, I didn’t give it to him. I fancy it must have been Ascher. Anyhow he’s got it. He’s down in Hertfordshire now, living in a barn.”
“Why? A barn seems an odd place to live in. Draughty, I should think.”
“He wanted space,” said Gorman, “a great deal of space to work at his experiments. I’m inclined to think there may be something in this new idea of his.”
“The living picture idea? Making real ghosts of the figures?”
“That’s it. And, do you know, he’s getting at it. He showed me some perfectly astonishing results the other day. If he pulls it off——”
“You won’t let Ascher get hold of it this time,” I said.
Gorman frowned.
“I wouldn’t let Ascher touch it if I could help it, but what the devil can I do? We shall want capital and I suppose Ascher is no worse than the rest of them.”
By “them” Gorman evidently meant capitalists in general and financiers in particular.
“That’s the way,” he said. “Not only do these scoundrels control politics, reducing the whole system of democracy to a farce——”