Page:Love and Mr. Lewisham – Wells (1899).djvu/212

200 under the tail of his coat. The whole room seemed snapping its fingers at Lewisham for a space.

"Very well, and now take the other side. Take the severest test I ever tried. Two respectable professors of physics—not Newtons, you understand, but good, worthy, self-important professors of physics—a lady anxious to prove there's a life beyond the grave, a journalist who wants stuff to write—a person, that is, who gets his living by these researches just as I do—undertook to test me. Test me! Of course they had their other work to do, professing physics, professing religion, organising research, and so forth. At the outside they don't think an hour a day about it, and most of them had never cheated anybody in their existence, and couldn't, for example, travel without a ticket for a three-mile journey and not get caught, to save their lives.  Well—you see the odds?"

He paused. Lewisham appeared involved in some interior struggle.

"You know," explained Chaffery, "it was quite an accident you got me—quite. The thing slipped out of my mouth. Or your friend with the flat voice wouldn't have had a chance. Not a chance."

Lewisham spoke like a man who is lifting a weight. "All this, you know, is off the question. I'm not disputing your ability. But the thing is it isn't right."