“He hasn’t gone into it, I know; it’s the thing itself, let severely alone for six months, that has simply sprung out at him like a tigress out of the jungle. He didn’t take a book with him—on purpose; indeed he wouldn’t have needed to—he knows every page, as I do, by heart. They all worked in him together, and some day somewhere, when he wasn’t thinking, they fell, in all their superb intricacy, into the one right combination. The figure in the carpet came out. That’s the way he knew it would come and the real reason—you didn’t in the least understand, but I suppose I may tell you now—why he went and why I consented to his going. We knew the change would do it—that the difference of thought, of scene, would give the needed touch, the magic shake. We had perfectly, we had admirably calculated. The elements were all in his mind, and in the secousse of a new and intense experience they just struck light.” She positively struck light herself—she was literally, facially luminous. I stammered something about unconscious cerebration, and she continued: “He’ll come right home—this will bring him.”
“To see Vereker, you mean?”
“To see Vereker—and to see me. Think what he’ll have to tell me!”
I hesitated. “About India?”
“About fiddlesticks! About Vereker—about the figure in the carpet.”
“But, as you say, we shall surely have that in a letter.”
She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had told me long before that her face was interesting. “Perhaps it can’t be got into a letter if it’s ‘immense.’”
“Perhaps not if it’s immense bosh. If he has hold of something that can’t be got into a letter he hasn’t hold of the thing. Vereker’s own statement to me was exactly that the ‘figure’ would fit into a letter.”
“Well, I cabled to George an hour ago—two words,” said Gwendolen.
“Is it indiscreet of me to ask what they were?”