Page:Chesterton - The Club of Queer Trades.djvu/274

The Club of Queer Trades man in the moon. A conversationalist like yourself, however, can scarcely be seriously handicapped by any bodily posture. You were saying, if I remember right, when this incidental fracas occurred, that the rudiments of science might with advantage be made public."

"Precisely," said the large man on the floor, in an easy tone. "I hold that nothing more than a rough sketch of the universe as seen by science can be …"

And here the voices died away as we descended into the basement. I noticed that Mr. Greenwood did not join in the amicable controversy. Strange as it may appear, I think he looked back upon our proceedings with a slight degree of resentment. Mr. Burrows, however, was all philosophy and chattiness. We left them, as I say, together, and sank deeper and deeper into the underworld of that mysterious house, which perhaps appeared to us somewhat more Tartarian than it really was, owing to our knowledge of its semicriminal mystery and of the human secret locked below. 250