"Intensely."
Lanyard laughed. "Monsieur will pardon my suggesting that his sources of information, however busy, are unreliable if they have led him to believe my small affairs worthy of his attention."
"Point of view again." Morphew dismissed argument with a flirt of a massive hand. "Be that as it may: I've been anxious to meet you to ask you to help me answer a certain question."
"Indeed?"
"Perhaps it would be more nearly right to call it a problem in psychology."
"I am all attention."
"It's like this . . ." Morphew had resumed his customary guise of profound solemnity. "What I want your expert opinion on, Mr. Lanyard, is the question of whether it's possible for a man . . . say he's a friend I'm taking a personal interest in . . . a man who built up a pretty warm criminal reputation for himself, when he was younger, and then hit the sawdust trail apparently for keeps . . . Whether it's possible for such a man to keep going straight in the face of every possible incentive to set up shop again as a master crook."
"Such incentives as——?" Lanyard enquired with every symptom of intelligent interest in a hypothetical instance.
"Well! let's suppose this man I've got in mind, this friend of mine, has fallen for a woman who's got everything, social position, any amount of coin, all that sort of thing. Say she's in love with him, too, and they want to get married. But my friend is broke, or next thing to it; and he's got a touchy sense of honour—sometimes reformed crooks have, you know—so he can't marry the woman, because that would make him look like a fortune-hunter if she ever found out he hadn't a red cent; and he can't let on to her he's stoney, because then she'd insist on marrying him to support him, and he'd feel like a yellow pup; and he can't do a quiet fade-out, either, because then she'd think he hadn't been on the level with her, and that would break her heart. That leaves him where? He's got to have coin to go on with, and the only way to get it is for him to remember some of the things he's been trying to forget. He's living in a city where there's more money and loot lying round loose to be picked up for the taking than any place else in the world, and where police protection against burglary and highway robbery is a positive joke, where a good fat safe is cracked or a hold-up pulled off every other day, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred the crook's never caught. So you see our friend has just what I said he had, every temptation to come back strong in the housebreaking line, and practically nothing to fear—except maybe that the woman he's crazy about will tumble sometime to how he's getting his dough. And that's the problem that's been puzzling me, Mr. Lanyard: What's our friend going to do? . . . What would you do?"
Lanyard thoughtfully ground out the fire of his cigarette in an ash-tray and got up. "I imagine," he said quietly, "your anonymous friend would do precisely what I mean to do, Mr. Morphew. He would gee well weary of tedious beating about the bush, but at the same time would remind himself that the obligations which devolve upon a guest constrain him to overlook, for the present, a piece of damnable impertinence. He would for that reason take his hat and coat and stick—as you see me taking mine—and finally his departure—as I shall take mine, monsieur, pausing only to advise you . . ."