"What's the matter with 'em?" demanded Carrick, inspecting his shabby sleeve. "You don't want me to dress up like—like you, do you?"
"My dear fellow!" Mr. Newman smiled protestingly, lifting a suave hand. "I don't care how you dress. I don't want you to 'make broad your phylacteries,' you know."
Carrick snorted, and they walked in silence through the little village that lay below the church.
The matter they had in common, which bridged their diversity and made it possible for them to be, after their fashion, friends, was their interest in the subject which Carrick had made his own—experimental psychology. Like all successful business men, Mr. Newman had an unschooled aptitude for the science, and had practised it with profit on his competitors and employees before he knew a word of its technology. In Carrick's bare and lamp-lit study they had joined forces to bewilder and undermine the intelligence of the sly spaniel, and there had been sessions of hypnotism, with Mr. Newman rigid in trances, while Carrick groped, as it were, among the springs of his mind. The pair of them had incurred the indignation of European authorities, writing in obscure and costly little journals whose names the general public never heard. The bond of martyrdom— martyrdom in print—united them.
"By the way," suggested Mr. Newman, when the village was behind them and they were walking between high hedgerows flamboyant with summer growth. "By the way, wasn't there something you wanted to speak to me about?"
"Eh? Oh yes," replied Carrick. "Bother! I want you to come to my place to-night to try something—something new, a big thing."
"To-night?" said Mr. Newman. "No, not to-night, Carrick."
"Why not?" demanded Carrick. "I tell you, it's a big thing. I've had an idea of it for some time; those clairvoyant tests put me on to it; but I've only just got it clear. It's big."
Mr. Newman shook his head. "Not to-night," he said. "You're a queer fellow, Carrick; you never can remember what day of the week it is for more than five minutes at a time."
"Oh!" Carrick scowled. "You mean it's Sunday. But this—I tell you, this isn't just an ordinary thing, Newman. I'll explain—it's new and it's big!"