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“Ah!” I said. “You’ve been reading detective stories.”
“The essence of a detective story,” I said, “is to have a rare poison—if possible something from South America, that nobody has ever heard of—something that one obscure tribe of savages use to poison their arrows with. Death is instantaneous, and Western science is powerless to detect it. Is that the kind of thing you mean?”
His name, apparently, is Mr. Porrott—a name which conveys an odd feeling of unreality.
“The chains of habit. We work to attain an object, and the object gained, we find that what we miss is the daily toil.
Providence—a divinity that shapes our ends, as Shakespeare’s beautiful line runs.”
Everyone had a hand in the elucidation of the mystery. It was rather like a jig-saw puzzle to which everyone contributed their own little piece of knowledge or discovery.
Fortunately words, ingeniously used, will serve to mask the ugliness of naked facts.
“I’ve just been reading a book from the library about the underworld of Paris, and it says that some of the worst women criminals are young girls with the faces of angels.”
One can press a man as far as one likes—but with a woman one must not press too far. For a woman has at heart a great desire to speak the truth.
