“Let me put it in this way,” he said, striving conscientiously to speak in words of not more than one syllable. “Suppose _you_ committed a murder, George. Suppose you were playing with the vicar, and he foozled his tee-shot to the last green and the whole match, and half-a-crown, depended on it; and suppose, unable to live in the same world with such bungling incompetence, you smote him on the head with one of your clubs, so that he died. Are you supposing all that?” “Ye-es,” said George, supposing manfully. “Well, what would interest us is not whether you smote him with your mashie or your niblick, or how much he bled, or whether his death-agonies removed any divots from the fairway. Nothing like that at all, George. Simply the state of your mind which showed you in one moment of blinding revelation that nothing short of murder was demanded by the situation.” “But I’m not a murderer,” said George, putting his finger on the weak spot. “No, George, at present you’re not; at least, so we hope. But if you ever happened to murder anybody, then you, yes, even you, George Howard, would be a murderer; and we should be studying the intricate psychology which caused you to snatch at your niblick and lay the vicar low just as eagerly as we now discuss the singular mentality of Mr. George Joseph Smith, who drowned a woman in her bath one minute and strummed on the organ in his sitting-room the next.” “What he means,” Mr. Doyle chimed in, “is that the really interesting thing is the reactions of the ordinary person to the idea of murder. What he feels like,” he amplified kindly, “after he’s done it, in fact.” “And before,” Guy amended. “And before,” Mr. Doyle agreed. “Look, in short, upon this picture and on that. Mr. Howard before murder, same gent after murder. The cross marks the spot where the body was found.” “So now do you understand, George?” Guy inquired. “I think so,” George responded, trying to look as if he did. “You mean, you like probing into the mind of a chap who’s committed a murder?” “In a nutshell!” approved Mr. Doyle. “But unfortunately we have to do our probing at second-hand,” Guy lamented. “Or rather, we have to let others do the probing for us and then try to draw our own deductions. What wouldn’t you give, Doyle, for the chance to probe yourself? To psycho-analyse a murderer before the law got hold of him and messed his mind up?” “Oh, don’t!” “To have him under observation right from the time of the crime,” Guy gloated wistfully. “To know exactly what he thought and felt and did.” “Don’t tempt me, Nesbitt! I’ll be getting George to murder you in a minute, if you go on like this. I promise I wouldn’t give you away, George, if you’d only let me psycho-analyse you afterwards.”