“Angela,” said Bredon when he found her, “I’ve got a job of work for you.”

“Such as?”

“All you’ve got to do is to make Brinkman and Pulteney open their cigarette-cases for inspection without knowing that they’re doing it.”

“Miles, it won’t do. You know I can’t work in blinkers. There’s nothing I dislike so much as a want of complete confidence between husband and wife. Sit down and tell me all about it. You’d better make sure of the door first.” And she turned down the little shutter which protected their keyhole on the inside.

“Oh, all right,” said Bredon, and told the story of their recent alarms. “It almost must be somebody in the house. Brinkman and Pulteney are both cigarette-smokers, and of course it would be easy for me to cadge a cigarette by saying I’d run short. But that just might put the mysterious gentleman on his guard. And I don’t want to hang about picking up fags. So what you’ve got to do is to lead round the conversation in such a way that we can have an opportunity of finding out what cigarettes each of them smokes without his suspecting anything.”

“Why not pinch some from their rooms?”

“It might work. But since people took to smoking all kinds of vile cigarettes at the end of the war, one doesn’t trouble to carry one’s own brand about. One buys them at the local shop. These Callipolis are an oddity, but there probably aren’t many more where they came from, and the safest place to look for them is inside somebody’s breast-pocket. Anyhow, you might try.”

“Sort of salted almonds game?” said Angela reflectively. “All right, I will. Don’t you try your hand at it; sit there and back me up. Meanwhile, you’d better go down and have a pick-me-up at the bar, because I’m going to dress for dinner.”

“Dress for dinner, in a hole like this? Whatever for?”

“You don’t understand the technique of the thing. If I’m to have complete control of the conversation, I must be looking my best. It makes all the difference with a susceptible old dear like Edward.”

She certainly had made herself look attractive, if a trifle exotic, by the time she came downstairs. The maid all but broke the soup-plates at the sight of her.

“Did you see much of Pullford, Mrs. Bredon?” asked Brinkman, on hearing of their day’s expedition.

“Much of it? Why, I’m practically a native of the place by now. I shall never see a perambulator again, I mean a drainpipe, without a sort of homely feeling. My husband left me alone for three solid hours while he went and caroused with the hierarchy.”

“A very genial man, isn’t he, the Bishop,” said Brinkman, appealing to her husband.

“What a poor compliment that word ‘genial’ is,” put in the old gentleman. “I would sooner be called well-meaning, myself. You have no grounds for saying that a man is really kind or charitable; you have not personally found him attractive; and yet he has a sort of good-natured way with him which demands some tribute. So you say he is genial.”

“Like a Dickens character?” suggested Brinkman.

“No, they are too human to be called merely genial. Mr. Pickwick genial! It is like calling the day of judgment a fine sight. How did Pusey, by the way, ever have the wit to light upon such a comparison?”

“I think ‘witty’ is rather a dreadful thing to be called,” said Angela. “I always think of witty people as people who dominate the conversation with long anecdotes. How glad I am to have been born into a world in which the anecdote has gone out of fashion!”

“A hemisphere, Mrs. Bredon,” said Brinkman in correction. “You have not been to America? The anecdote there is in its first youth; the anecdotes mostly in their extreme old age.”

“There is a pleasant dryness about American humour,” objected Pulteney. “But I confess that I miss piquancy in it.”

“Like Virginian tobacco?” suggested Bredon, and was rewarded by a savage kick from Angela under the table.

“The anecdote, however,” pursued Mr. Pulteney, “is the enemy of conversation. With its appearance, the shadow of egotism falls over our conviviality. The man who hoards up anecdotes, and lets them loose at intervals, is a social indecency; he might as well strip and parade some kind of acrobatic feat. See how your anecdotist lies in wait for his opportunity, prays for the moment that will lend excuse to his ‘That reminds me.’ There is a further pitch of shamelessness at which such a man will assault you openly with ‘Have you heard this one?’ But as long as men have some rags of behaviour left to them your sex, Mrs. Bredon, saves us from this conversational horror. When the ladies leave us, anecdotes flow out as from a burst dam.”

“That’s because we don’t know how to tell stories; we don’t drag them out enough. When I try to tell a story I always find I have got to the point when I’ve only just started.”

“You are too modest, Mrs. Bredon. It is your essential altruism which preserves you. You women are always for helping out the conversation, not strangling it at birth. You humour us men, fool us to the top of our bent, yet you always restrain conversation from its worst extravagances⁠—like a low organ accompaniment you unobtrusively give us the note. All praise to your unselfishness!”

“I expect we are trained that way, or have trained ourselves that way. Civilization has taught us, perhaps, to play up to the men.”

“Indeed, no,” chirped Mr. Pulteney, now thoroughly enjoying himself. “Conversational receptivity is a natural glory of your sex. Nature itself, which bids the peacock strut to the admiration of the hen, bids you evoke the intellectual powers of the male. You flatter him by your attention and he basks unconsciously in your approval. How much more knowledge of human nature had Virgil than Homer! Alcinous would never have got all that long story out of Ulysses; challenged by a direct question the hero would probably have admitted, in a gruff voice, that he had been fooling around somewhere. It was a Dido that was needed to justify the hysteron proteron⁠—‘Multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hectore multa’⁠—she knew how to do it! But I become lyrical.”

“Do please be lyrical, Mr. Pulteney. It’s so good for Miles; he thinks he’s a strong, silent man, and there’s nothing more odious. The trouble is, of course, he thinks he’s a kind of detective, and he has to play up to the part. Look at you, Mr. Leyland, you’ve hardly uttered.”

“Is this helping us out in conversation, Mrs. Bredon? You seem to be flogging us into it.”

“The strong silence of the detective,” explained the old gentleman, “is a novelists’ fiction. The novelist must gag his detective, or how is he to preserve his secret till the last chapter? No, it is Mr. Brinkman who should be professionally silent; for what is a secretary if he does not keep secrets?”

“I am not silent, I am silenced,” said Brinkman. “The second best peacock dare not strut for fear of an encounter.”

“I find in silence,” said Bredon, “a mere relief from the burden of conversation. I am grateful to the man who talks, as I should be grateful to the man who jumped in before me to rescue a drowning baby. He obviates the necessity for effort on my part. I sometimes think that is why I married.”

“Miles,” said Angela, “if you are going to be odious, you will have to leave the room. I suppose you think you can be rude because the detectives in fiction are rude? Mr. Leyland may be silent, but at least he’s polite.”

“Mr. Bredon is married,” suggested Pulteney. “The caged bird does not strut. His are golden chains, I hasten to add, but they take the spring out of him none the less. For all that, I have some contempt for the man who does not take his share in shouldering the burden of conversation. He puts nothing into the common pot. Mr. Brinkman, I resign the strutting-ground. Tell us whether you think detectives should be strong, silent men or not.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t read much in that direction, Mr. Pulteney. I should imagine it was an advantage to the detective to be silent, so that he can be in a good position to say ‘I told you so’ when the truth comes out.”

“Oh, but a detective ought to be talking all the time,” protested Angela. “The ones in the books always are. Only what they say is always entirely incomprehensible, both to the other people in the book and to the reader. ‘Let me call your attention once more,’ they say; ‘to the sinister significance of the bend in the toast-rack,’ and there you are, none the wiser. Wouldn’t you like to be a detective, Mr. Pulteney?”

“Why, in a sense I am.” There was a slight pause, with several mental gasps in it, till the old gentleman continued, “That is to say, I am a schoolmaster; and the two functions are nearly akin. Who threw the butter at the ceiling, which boy cribbed from which, where the missing postage-stamp has got to⁠—these are the problems which agitate my inglorious old age. I do not know why headmasters allow boys to collect postage-stamps; they are invariably stolen.”

“Or why anybody wants to collect them?” suggested Angela. “Some of them are quite pretty, of course. But I’ve no patience with all this pedantry about the exact date of issue and the exact shape of the watermark. But I suppose the watermark helps you in your investigations, Mr. Pulteney?”

“I am hardly professional enough for that. I leave that to the philatelist. A philatelist, by the way, means one who loves the absence of taxes. It hardly seems to mark out the stamp-lover from his fellows.”

“The detectives of fiction,” put in Leyland, “are always getting important clues from the watermark of the paper on which some cryptic document is written, That is where they have the luck. If you pick up the next four pieces of paper you see, and hold them up to the light, you will probably find that three of them have no watermark at all.”

“I know,” said Angela. “And I used to be told, when I was small, that every genuine piece of silver had a lion stamped on it. But of course they haven’t really. I should think it’s quite likely the wristwatch you gave me, Miles dear, has no lion on it.” She took it off as she spoke. “Or it must be a teeny-weeny one if there is.”

“I think you’re wrong there, Mrs. Bredon.” It was Brinkman who offered the correction. “If you’ll allow me to have a look at it.⁠ ⁠… There, up there; it’s a little rubbed away, but it’s a lion all right.”

“I thought there always was a lion,” said Bredon, taking out a silver pencil-case with some presence of mind. “Yes, this has got two, one passant and one cabinet size.”

“Let’s see your watch, Mr. Leyland,” suggested Angela, “or is it electro?”

“It should be silver; yes, there’s the little chap.” Immediately afterward, Angela was rewarded by seeing Pulteney take a silver cigarette-case out of his pocket, and handing it over to her. “It’ll be on the inside of this, I suppose? Oh, no, it’s all gilt stuff; yes, I see, here it is on the outside.” It is to be feared that she added “Damn!” under her breath; the cigarette-case had been empty.

“I seem to be the only poor man present,” said Brinkman; “I am all gunmetal.”

Angela did not trouble to influence the conversation further until the “shape” course was finished. Then, rather desperately, she said, “Do smoke, Mr. Leyland, I know you’re dying to. What is a detective without his shag?” and was rewarded by seeing Brinkman take out the gunmetal case and light up. Mr. Pulteney, after verifying his own cigarettelessness, began slowly to fill a briar.

Brinkman’s cigarette, she had seen, was the last in the case; what if it should be the last of its box or of its packet? “I wish I smoked,” she said. “But if I did I would smoke a pipe; it always looks so comfortable. Besides, you can shut your eyes and go to sleep with a pipe, which must be rather dangerous with a cigarette.”

“You’d lose the taste of the pipe if you did,” objected Brinkman. “It’s an extraordinary thing, how little satisfaction you can get out of smoking in the dark.”

“Is that really true? I’ve always heard that about taste depending on sight, and not being able to distinguish one wine from another with one’s eyes shut. Miles, if I put a handkerchief over your eyes, could you tell your beer from Mr. Brinkman’s cider? Oo, I say, let’s try! I’ll give them you in spoonfuls.”

“I’ll shut my eyes, but play fair,” suggested Bredon. The idiocy of men!

“No, you won’t, you’ll do what you’re told. Anybody got a clean hanky? Thank you so much, Mr. Leyland.⁠ ⁠… There, that’s right. Now, open your mouth, but not too wide, or you’ll choke.⁠ ⁠… Which was that?”

“Cider, I thought.”

“It was vinegar, really, with a little water in it.”

“Oh, shut up, that’s not fair.” Miles tore away the handkerchief from his eyes. “Hang it all, I won’t strut; I’m a married man!”

“Then Mr. Brinkman shall try instead; you will, won’t you, Mr. Brinkman?” It is to be feared that Angela favoured him with an appealing look; at any rate, he succumbed. With the instinct of the blindfolded man, he put his cigarette down on the edge of his plate. It was easy work for Angela to drop the spoon, and set Mr. Pulteney grovelling for it. Meanwhile, she hastily picked up Brinkman’s cigarette, and read the word “Callipoli.”