This is the important part. All the rest had been a mere forensic display, and I had already had more than enough of it, dazzling though it was. And yet, even when the whole damn truth came out, it was still marvellously under his control. He played with it; he let us have it in carefully arranged doses; it was the truth only if we cared to believe it was. He began by laughing at us for our unskilful attempts to cross-examine. Logic, he told us, was the great essential, and logic was what we lacked. "If you had attacked the matter logically, you would have deduced two principal reasons why a man can leave his wife. One is that he has got tired of her, and the other is that she had got tired of him.... Why were you in such a hurry to assume the former only?" The colour rose sharply into Terry's face, but he said nothing, and neither did I. Severn, after looking at us both enquiringly, resumed: "I'm going to tell you very simply what's been happening during the last few years. It really is very simple.... Just this. My wife and I were quite happy together until--oh, a number of years ago. Then--very suddenly--she changed--and we haven't been at all happy since. That's all it amounts to. Didn't I say it was simple?" Of course it wasn't simple at all, and he knew that as well as we did. And that's why I won't attempt to set down the story in Severn's own words. Like most men of marked ability, he had mannerisms--lightning gestures of hand and finger, sharp changes of tone, tricks of speech, and so on--all, no doubt, accentuated and standardized by his work at the Bar. Normally, in private conversation, he suppressed them, but now, as he told us about himself and Helen, they simply broke out all over the place. It was as if he were savagely and maliciously parodying himself; he pleaded his own case with an extravagant eloquence that was perfectly absurd before an audience of two. Perhaps his most irritating and persistent trick was the rhetorical question; he would say: "Now why do you think Helen changed?" and then, when neither of us answered, continue, as he might have done to a jury: "Well, why _do_ women change? Shall we say _Cherchez l'homme_? ... I agree, but suppose you can't find any man--what then?" ... And so on, for well over half-an-hour. And the upshot of it all was this.