"Hanson? Hanson? Did he say he knew me?"
"He wasn't sure. He thinks he ran across you. He knew you by sight, anyway, for he described you to me."
"Hanson? No, I give it up. Don't remember him at all. You met such crowds of chaps, you see—sometimes it's just like a dream——"
I appreciated that; but there still remained one thing that was no dream. This was Philip's explicit declaration, "Oh, he remembers all right—it was the other I didn't tell him—that anybody else knew." Philip might now be resolved to let the whole affair sink into oblivion, but Philip after all had not shot anybody. On that morning when I had had my talk with Mackwith I had been rather pleased with my acumen in pointing out that whether our Case had legal consequences or not its moral consequences were inescapable. Yet here, if I could believe my own eyes, was a man who was escaping them in their entirety. He continued to order Journals that Bobby had "put him on to," and could speak of his victim apparently out of some transcendental state of mind where sorrow was an anomaly and regret beside the mark. It all appeared to be admirable, but I found it quite incomprehensible.
"But," I came out of my reverie presently, "you haven't yet told me what 'it' was that Bobby knew all about."
"Do you mean those books?" he asked.
"No, I don't mean the books at all. I know a good deal about books. You can get so soaked in them that you make a whole artificial world out of them, quite self-contained, logical with itself at every single point, and absolutely out of touch with anything that really matters. Do you see what I mean?"
I wasn't sure that he did, and here was I, who do not talk easily to young men, quite anxious that he should.
"Well, let's put it another way. You say Bobby knew all about these equations and diagrams and things. Did he know what it was all for—really for—not just wind-resistance or whatever you call it, but something more—why there should be aeroplanes at all, for example?"
I had said it badly, but I saw his brow clear. There was a kindling in the eyes he turned to me.