I might have answered that I held a watching brief, but that's the sort of clever reply one doesn't think of till afterwards. And yet it absolutely summed up my position; I _was_ watching, and with a diffidence that gradually, as the affair proceeded, developed into rather dissatisfied disgust. For, as I had feared, the whole thing was almost a fiasco. Terry was sheerly defenceless against Severn; he couldn't think or talk a quarter as fast; he had none of the arts of suavity or blandness; he could only sit there, minute after minute, in a sort of dogged, stupefied silence.... Really, it was no fight at all; it was merely Severn giving a free exhibition of himself. Perhaps you have heard Severn defending a difficult case in a court of law. He rises quickly to his feet, all smiles and courtesy to everybody; he talks calmly and suavely for a few moments, just to give the prosecution time to reflect what a charming man he is; and then, quite suddenly, he says something unexpected. Perhaps he startles by some unguessed admission, or brings forth a new and unlooked-for item of evidence. But anyhow, after politely upsetting most of the ideas you already have, he proceeds, still politely, to build up in you the ideas he wants you to have. And that is the way he earns his hundreds of pounds a week. You can picture him, therefore, striding into the lounge of the Andrassy, bestowing on everybody a charming smile, ordering drinks, offering cigars, remarking on the hot weather, and generally, in fact, behaving as if he hadn't a ghost of an idea what we wanted him for. And you can picture Terry, clenching his hands with a queer sort of nervous firmness, declining the drink and the cigar, and going straight ahead to the vital question--was this woman, this Greek dancer, Severn's mistress? Terry was too nervous to lead up to the question gradually. And Severn was too clever to lead down from it gradually. He answered, as sharply and instantly as a pistol-shot: "Yes. And what of it?" II