Michaelis obviously wasn’t an Englishman, in spite of all the tailors, hatters, barbers, booters of the very best quarter of London. No, no, he obviously wasn’t an Englishman: the wrong sort of flattish, pale face and bearing; and the wrong sort of grievance. He had a grudge and a grievance: that was obvious to any true–born English gentleman, who would scorn to let such a thing appear blatant in his own demeanour. Poor Michaelis had been much kicked, so that he had a slightly tail–between–the–legs look even now. He had pushed his way by sheer instinct and sheerer effrontery on to the stage and to the front of it, with his plays. He had caught the public. And he had thought the kicking days were over. Alas, they weren’t... They never would be. For he, in a sense, asked to be kicked. He pined to be where he didn’t belong...among the English upper classes. And how they enjoyed the various kicks they got at him! And how he hated them!

Nevertheless he travelled with his manservant and his very neat car, this Dublin mongrel.

There was something about him that Connie liked. He didn’t put on airs to himself, he had no illusions about himself. He talked to Clifford sensibly, briefly, practically, about about all the things Clifford wanted to know. He didn’t expand or let himself go. He knew he had been asked down to Wragby to be made use of, and like an old, shrewd, almost indifferent business man, or big–business man, he let himself be asked questions, and he answered with as little waste of feeling as possible.

‘Money!’ he said. ‘Money is a sort of instinct. It’s a sort of property of nature in a man to make money. It’s nothing you do. It’s no trick you play. It’s a sort of permanent accident of your own nature; once you start, you make money, and you go on; up to a point, I suppose.’

‘But you’ve got to begin,’ said Clifford.

‘Oh, quite! You’ve got to get IN. You can do nothing if you are kept outside. You’ve got to beat your way in. Once you’ve done that, you can’t help it.’

‘But could you have made money except by plays?’ asked Clifford.

‘Oh, probably not! I may be a good writer or I may be a bad one, but a writer and a writer of plays is what I am, and I’ve got to be. There’s no question of that.’

‘And you think it’s a writer of popular plays that you’ve got to be?’ asked Connie.

‘There, exactly!’ he said, turning to her in a sudden flash. ‘There’s nothing in it! There’s nothing in popularity. There’s nothing in the public, if it comes to that. There’s nothing really in my plays to make them popular. It’s not that. They just are like the weather...the sort that will HAVE to be...for the time being.’

He turned his slow, rather full eyes, that had been drowned in such fathomless disillusion, on Connie, and she trembled a little. He seemed so old...endlessly old, built up of layers of disillusion, going down in him generation after generation, like geological strata; and at the same time he was forlorn like a child. An outcast, in a certain sense; but with the desperate bravery of his rat–like existence.

“But why would you not let me near you, since there was in truth no infection?”

“Can you ask, my dear Watson? Do you imagine that I have no respect for your medical talents? Could I fancy that your astute judgment would pass a dying man who, however weak, had no rise of pulse or temperature? At four yards, I could deceive you. If I failed to do so, who would bring my Smith within my grasp? No, Watson, I would not touch that box. You can just see if you look at it sideways where the sharp spring like a viper’s tooth emerges as you open it. I dare say it was by some such device that poor Savage, who stood between this monster and a reversion, was done to death. My correspondence, however, is, as you know, a varied one, and I am somewhat upon my guard against any packages which reach me. It was clear to me, however, that by pretending that he had really succeeded in his design I might surprise a confession. That pretence I have carried out with the thoroughness of the true artist. Thank you, Watson, you must help me on with my coat. When we have finished at the police-station I think that something nutritious at Simpson’s would not be out of place.”

“But why Turkish?” asked Mr. Sherlock Holmes, gazing fixedly at my boots. I was reclining in a cane-backed chair at the moment, and my protruded feet had attracted his ever-active attention.

“English,” I answered in some surprise. “I got them at Latimer’s, in Oxford Street.”

Holmes smiled with an expression of weary patience.

“The bath!” he said; “the bath! Why the relaxing and expensive Turkish rather than the invigorating home-made article?”

“Because for the last few days I have been feeling rheumatic and old. A Turkish bath is what we call an alterative in medicine — a fresh starting-point, a cleanser of the system.

“By the way, Holmes,” I added, “I have no doubt the connection between my boots and a Turkish bath is a perfectly self-evident one to a logical mind, and yet I should be obliged to you if you would indicate it.”

“The train of reasoning is not very obscure, Watson,” said Holmes with a mischievous twinkle. “It belongs to the same elementary class of deduction which I should illustrate if I were to ask you who shared your cab in your drive this morning.”

“I don’t admit that a fresh illustration is an explanation,” said I with some asperity.

“Bravo, Watson! A very dignified and logical remonstrance. Let me see, what were the points? Take the last one first — the cab. You observe that you have some splashes on the left sleeve and shoulder of your coat. Had you sat in the centre of a hansom you would probably have had no splashes, and if you had they would certainly have been symmetrical. Therefore it is clear that you sat at the side. Therefore it is equally clear that you had a companion.”

“That is very evident.”

“Absurdly commonplace, is it not?”