e says. To his platitudes."

"His platitudes?" I stared. "Long's?"

"Why, don't you know he's a prize fool?"

I mused, sceptical but reasonable. "He _was_."

"He _is_!"

Mrs. Briss was superb, but, as I quickly felt I might remind her, there
was her possibly weak judgment. "Your confidence is splendid; only
mustn't I remember that your sense of the finer kinds of cleverness
isn't perhaps absolutely secure? Don't you know?--you also, till just
now, thought _me_ a prize fool."

If I had hoped, however, here to trip her up, I had reckoned without the
impulse, and even perhaps the example, that she properly owed to me.
"Oh, no--not anything of that sort, you, at all. Only an intelligent man
gone wrong."

I followed, but before I caught up, "Whereas Long's only a stupid man
gone right?" I threw out.

It checked her too briefly, and there was indeed something of my own it
brought straight back. "I thought that just what you told me, this
morning or yesterday, was that you had never known a case of the
conversion of an idiot."

I laughed at her readiness. Well, I had wanted to make her fight! "It's
true it would have been the only one."

"Ah, you'll have to do without it!" Oh, she was brisk now. "And if you
know what I think of him, you know no more than _he_ does."

"You mean you told him?"

She hung fire but an instant. "I told him, practically--and it was in
fact all I did have to say to him. It was enough, however, and he
disgustedly left me on it. Then it was that, as you gave me the chance,
I tried to telegraph you--to say to you on the spot and under the sharp
impression: 'What on earth do you mean by your nonsense? It doesn't hold
water!' It's a pity I didn't succeed!" she continued--for she had become
almost voluble. "It would have settled the question, and I should have
gone to bed."

I weighed it with the grimace that, I feared, had become almost as fixed
as Mrs. Server's. "It would have settled the question perhaps; but I
should have lost this impression of you."

"Oh, this impression of me!"

"Ah, but don't undervalue it: it's what I want! What was it then Long
had said?"

She had it more and more, but she had it as nothing at all. "Not a word
to repeat--you wouldn't believe! He does say nothing at all. One can't
remember. It's what I mean. I tried him on purpose, while I thought of
you. But he's perfectly stupid. I don't see how we can have
fancied----!" I had interrupted her by the movement