My friend was charmed with my ingenuity. "How you've worked it out!"
"Well, I feel as if I were on the way to something."
He looked surprised. "Something still more?"
"Something still more." I had an impulse to tell him I scarce knew what. But I kept it under. "I seem to snuff up——"
"Quoi donc?"
"The sense of a discovery to be made."
"And of what?"
"I'll tell you to-morrow. Good-night."
III
I did on the morrow several things, but the first was not to redeem that vow. It was to address myself straight to Grace Brissenden. "I must let you know that, in spite of your guarantee, it doesn't go at all—oh, but not at all! I've tried Lady John, as you enjoined, and I can't but feel that she leaves us very much where we were." Then, as my listener seemed not quite to remember where we had been, I came to her help. "You said yesterday at Paddington, to explain the change in Gilbert Long—don't you recall?—that that woman, plying him with her genius and giving him of her best, is clever enough for two. She's not clever enough then, it strikes me, for three—or at any rate for four. I confess I don't see it. Does she really dazzle you?"