"The personal element signifying favouritism and venality?" asked
Eames. "A pretty state of affairs!"
"The philosopher can only live under a venal government."
"I disagree with you altogether."
"You always disagree with me," answered Keith. "And you always find yourself in the wrong. You remember how I warned you about that little affair of yours? You remember what an ass you made of yourself?"
"What little affair?" enquired Eames, with a tinge of resignation in his voice.
The other did not reply. Mr. Keith could be tactful, on occasions. He pretended to be absorbed in cutting a cigar.
"What little affair?" insisted the bibliographer, fearful of what was coming next.
It came.
"Oh, that balloon business…."
It was not true to say of Mr. Eames that he lived on Nepenthe because he was wanted by the London police for something that happened in Richmond Park, that his real name was not Eames at all but Daniels—the notorious Hodgson Daniels, you know, who was mixed up in the Lotus Club scandal, that he was the local representative of an international gang of white-slave traffickers who had affiliated offices in every part of the world, that he was not a man at all but an old boarding-house keeper who had very good reasons for assuming the male disguise, that he was a morphinomaniac, a disfrocked Baptist minister, a pawnbroker out of work, a fire-worshipper, a Transylvanian, a bank clerk who had had a fall, a decayed jockey who disgraced himself at a subsequent period in connection with some East-End mission for reforming the boys of Bermondsey and then, after pawning his mother's jewelry, writing anonymous threatening letters to society ladies about their husbands and vice-versa, trying to blackmail three Cabinet Ministers and tricking poor servant-girls out of their hard-earned wages by the sale of sham Bibles, was luckily run to earth in Piccadilly Circus, after an exciting chase, with a forty-pound salmon under his arm which he had been seen to lift from the window of a Bond Street fishmonger.