“I try to be,” Reggie said modestly.
Miss Lomas coughed. “These are the facts, Mr. Fortune.”
With minute and tiresome detail Reggie heard it all over again and learnt nothing new. One mistress’s room turned upside down in the night, nothing spoilt or taken—an interval—another mistress’s room turned upside down and a number of photographs of girls taken. Only that and nothing more. Reggie was bored, and let his eyes wander from the intensity of Miss Lomas. When at last she stopped, frowning at his lack of attention, and waited in angry majesty for him to say something—
“Are you interested in archaeology?” was what he said.
“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Lomas, in an awful voice.
“I was wonderin’ about this,” Reggie murmured, and took up from her table a little yellowish thing modelled into something like the shape of a woman. “Fascinatin’, isn’t she?”
“It seems to me childish or disgusting, Mr. Fortune,” Miss Lomas snapped at him. “It has nothing to do with the case. But I am afraid my affairs merely amuse you, Mr. Fortune.”
“Oh, please, please,” Reggie protested. “You see, you’re so lucid, Miss Lomas. These odd affairs are hardly ever lucid. Anything may have to do with anything. Just consider. You tell me that in your school there has been happening something unusual.”
“Extraordinary, unprecedented, and disturbing,” Miss Lomas cried.
“And then I find this lyin’ about—a Hottentot Venus in a girls’ school—that’s very highly unusual.”