If I had hoped, however, here to trip her up, I had reckoned without the impulse, and even perhaps the example, that she properly owed to me. "Oh, no—not anything of that sort, you, at all. Only an intelligent man gone wrong."
I followed, but before I caught up, "Whereas Long's only a stupid man gone right?" I threw out.
It checked her too briefly, and there was indeed something of my own it brought straight back. "I thought that just what you told me, this morning or yesterday, was that you had never known a case of the conversion of an idiot."
I laughed at her readiness. Well, I had wanted to make her fight! "It's true it would have been the only one."
"Ah, you'll have to do without it!" Oh, she was brisk now. "And if you know what I think of him, you know no more than he does."
"You mean you told him?"
She hung fire but an instant. "I told him, practically—and it was in fact all I did have to say to him. It was enough, however, and he disgustedly left me on it. Then it was that, as you gave me the chance, I tried to telegraph you—to say to you on the spot and under the sharp impression: 'What on earth do you mean by your nonsense? It doesn't hold water!' It's a pity I didn't succeed!" she continued—for she had become almost voluble. "It would have settled the question, and I should have gone to bed."
I weighed it with the grimace that, I feared, had become almost as fixed as Mrs. Server's. "It would have settled the question perhaps; but I should have lost this impression of you."
"Oh, this impression of me!"
"Ah, but don't undervalue it: it's what I want! What was it then Long had said?"