The next day, which was a Monday, Jones came to the office very early, and I was the first person to meet him.
"Well, Mr. Photographer," I asked "what success?"
"I got the picture all right," said Jones, unwrapping an unmounted picture and handing it over to me "most funny, don't you think so?" "No, I don't ... I think it is all right, at any rate I did not expect anything better from you ...", I said.
"No," said Jones "the funny thing is that only two ladies sat ..." "Quite right," I said "the third stood in the middle."
"There was no third lady at all there ...", said Jones.
"Then you imagined she was there, and there we find her ..." "I tell you, there were only two ladies there when I exposed" insisted Jones. He was looking awfully worried.
"Do you want me to believe that there were only two persons when the plate was exposed and three when it was developed?" I asked. "That is exactly what has happened," said Jones.
"Then it must be the most wonderful developer you used, or was it that this was the second exposure given to the same plate?"
"The developer is the one which I have been using for the last three years, and the plate, the one I charged on Saturday night out of a new box that I had purchased only on Saturday afternoon."
A number of other clerks had come up in the meantime, and were taking great interest in the picture and in Jones' statement.