“Well, you are like a man,” Robert Grimshaw said. “You look like a man, and you talk like a man....” She tapped her horse with her crop. “Oh, I’m all right,” she said. “But I wish--I wish to hell I had been one,” she called over her shoulder, whilst slowly she walked her horse along by the railings, searching with her eyes for the venerable figure and tousled grey hair emerging centaur-like from its bath-chair--the figure of the noted Lady Collimore, who had mysterious gifts, who had been known to make top-hats perform the feat of levitation, and whose barrack-like house at Queen’s Gate had an air of being filled with astrologers, palmists, and faith-healers. And the first thing that, bowler-hatted and in her tight habit, Etta Hudson said to Grimshaw in the taxi-cab was: “Now tell me the truth. Is everything that I’m going to say likely to be used as evidence against me?” “Oh, come, come!” Robert Grimshaw said. They were whirled past the tall houses and the flitting rails. They jerked along at a terrific rate down through Kensington until, falling into a stream of motor-propelled vehicles near the Albert Hall, their speed was reduced to a reasonable jog-trot. “Then you only want to know things,” Etta Stackpole said. “You see, one never can tell in these days what who’s up to. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have fixed it up with Leicester’s wife. She can divorce him and have you.” “Oh, it’s nothing of that sort,” Grimshaw said. She looked him up and down with her eyes, curious and scrutinizing. “I should have thought,” she said, “that she would have preferred you to Dudley. I’m only telling you this that you mayn’t think me mad, suspecting the other thing, but I see you from my window going into Dudley’s house, with your dog behind you. And I should have said that that child preferred you to Dudley, or would jolly well find out her mistake after she’d married him.” “Oh, it’s nothing of that sort,” Grimshaw reiterated. “I’ll take your word for it,” she answered. “So I expect it’s only curiosity that brought you here. Why do you always want to know such a jolly lot about people? It must give you a lot of trouble, and you don’t make anything out of it.” “My dear child,” Robert Grimshaw said, “why do you always...?” He hesitated and she put in mockingly: “Go in for cutting-out expeditions. That is what was on the tip of your tongue, wasn’t it, Robert? I’ve heard you say that of me from half a dozen sources. Well, I’ll tell you. I do what I do because I want to. It’s a hobby.” “And I do what I do because I want to,” Robert Grimshaw mocked her. “It’s my hobby. We’re Eve and the serpent. You want the apple and I want--I’ve got the knowledge.” “You have, have you?” she said. And when Grimshaw answered in the affirmative, she uttered a long and reflective, “Ah!” And then suddenly she said, “But this isn’t in the contract. You ought to talk about Dudley’s wife all the way down to Bushey. Tell me about her!”