He laughed. "Did you notice a small furniture van pulled up at the side of the road?" he asked. "If you had examined it closely you would have noticed a little hole at the back. The photographer was inside and the camera was at that hole." We were walking through Regent's Park at the time of this conversation and suddenly I sneezed, and I can sneeze louder than most men. It was fortunate I did so, for it showed me Mr. Furley's brain in action. He stopped dead. "By Jove," he said, "there's an idea!" I asked him to explain. "Why," he said, "for a film. A comic one. 'Mr. Splodgers catches cold,' or, if you like, 'The Fatal Sneeze.' You begin with Mr. Splodgers being caught in a shower and drenched; or falling into a river would perhaps be better. Anyhow, he gets wet through. Then you show him trying to prevent a cold. He tries everything, including the home Turkish bath, but in vain; the cold comes on. You see him in a sneezing-fit. The first sneeze brings down the chandelier, the second the bookcase, the third all the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the fourth the ceiling itself, and so on. It will be great. I'll arrange it right away. How would you like to be Mr. Splodgers?" I declined. "I must pay you for the idea, anyway," Mr. Furley continued. "What do you think would be fair? Five guineas?" "No," I said; "the idea was yours. All that I did was to sneeze. I make you a present of it." But you can't make a free gift to men like that. Although I was at home again in less than two hours I could not beat Mr. Furley's sense of reciprocity, and on my table was a package containing a hundred of the choicest cigars I ever owned. CHAPTER XX IN WHICH A NUMBER OF CRAFTSMEN DISCUSS THEIR PRACTICES, AND MR. LACEY DEFINES THE THINGS THAT MATTER I took Lacey to the novelists' evening at Dabney's. "We'll just sit in a corner," I said, "and listen through the smoke. Unless, of course, you want to join in: I am quite certain I shall not." "I shall join in if anyone is talking rubbish, of course," said Lacey quite simply, "just to put him right." How jolly to be as sure of oneself as that! "Well," I said, "I shall be silent. In fact, I have to be; because when I argue I am always converted, and that is so humiliating; or, at any rate, I recognize the truth in the other side's position. That is one disability; and another is that I am never sure of my spoken words. Give me a pen and whatever I say I will stand by; but when I talk I get led away." "We must each go our way," said Lacey, "but, personally, when I find a man talking nonsense I sling him up."