"If she's been for one she's been for a dozen for all I know. She was sent off to bathe."
"Well, she did bathe."
"Were you there? Did you see her?" he challenged me, now suspicious at every point.
"Yes. She bathed with Julia. I waited for them."
"You waited for Julia, you mean. Nipped in and out so as to be able to say she'd been and then dashed off with this fellow, I suppose. Look here, he appears to be a protégé of yours, but I want to know more about him before there's any more of this. What does he go about in that rig for? Why does he talk French like that?" (This last headed the list of his offences in Alec's eyes.) "There's something fishy about the whole thing. Jennie sees him sketching, evidently doesn't know any more than the man in the moon who he is, and goes up to him and speaks to him in French and he answers in English! Then he says he's a level-time man, but touched in the bellows. He's about as much touched in the bellows as I am!... Who is he? Did he really stay with you? How did you get to know him?"
"He did stay with me. He's perfectly straight. Don't make such a fuss."
"Well, I expect Jennie's as much to blame as he is. They generally are. If I've told Madge once ... anyway it's got to stop. Of course if he's a friend of yours that's another matter, but gadding about all over the place has got to stop. Is she back yet? I want to see her when she does come in."
And so on. I left him in his cage, angrily knocking out his pipe against the lattice.
The worst of it was that Alec was so very much righter than he knew. I had ventured to assure him that our young French-speaker was perfectly straight, and you know how far that was true. In the wider sense who was crookeder, whose life more devious? Not one straight step did his circumstances permit him to take. Why, the only satisfactory way he had been able to hit on to provide himself with money had been his fantastic idea of fighting Georges Carpentier, the simplest way he had found of crossing the Channel had been to swim it! Straight? Too straight altogether. The world is not accustomed to people so straight that they go straight plumb into the heart of things like that.... And, merely as straightness, how was he now to acquire even an ordinary identity? Had he been anybody, had he in the past once possessed an identity he was able to acknowledge, ways might have been found. He would then have had a starting point. He might have invested himself with a name and place in the world by means of the French equivalent of a deed poll. He might have got himself cited by name in a civil court, have snatched a social existence even out of the formalities of registration attendant on a State Lottery. But not one of these ways was open to him. Nothing short of an act of creation could establish him. Nothing comes out of nothing, nothing can be made out of nothing. Stronger even than that Tower of stone is this other invisible Tower in which we all live, each stone an ego, its mortar the whole complicated everyday nexus of the social fabric. All that he was able to do was to make assertion that he was Arnaud, and let us take it or leave it at that. How Alec would take it there was very little doubt.
Nor was there much doubt in Madge's case either. She might talk family histories and hidden scandals till the cows came home, but, in the end, the Airds' would be the last household into which any suitor would penetrate without the strictest investigation. Derry might palm off his Somerset Trehernes upon us during a casual tea-hour, but Alec would now dive into the last pigeon-hole in Somerset House but he would know exactly who it was who aspired to become his son-in-law.