“Well, you see by the time a lie has passed through the mind of a man (or a woman for that matter) it has generally undergone certain modifications, and it is my work to get at the truth, which is, of course, a lie, in its original form.” “I see. Then a pure lie is unadulterated truth?” “Yes. And that is why a real lie is so hard to discover. It is essentially the truth.” “But why are you so hard upon the newspapers? You do not leave one paragraph unstudied.” “It is my work,” she asserted. “A lie that is allowed to circulate gains in bulk though it loses in truth.” “What do you mean?” I inquired. “Never ask me what I mean. I talk at random, and if it hits the mark, so much the better, and if not, well, it is none the worse.” “Do you then read these papers purely from a business standpoint?” “Undoubtedly. When I read purely for pleasure I read our own. And these are dull work after them. They lack the brilliancy, truth, incisiveness and humour that characterise ours. But there—why do I try to compare them?” “Yet some of these are very good?” “Oh, yes,” she answered with a contemptuous curl of her lips. “And very good things are like very bad things, very uninteresting.” “You are hard to please.” “Not at all, but I like if possible to be pleased in a particular way.” “I see. My only wonder is that since you are undoubtedly interested in the world you do not take more pains to make your likes and dislikes known.” “Interested in which world?” she questioned. “Earth.” She now got up laughing and came and sat down on a chair by the fire opposite me. “I’ll leave the papers to-day, they make me melancholy, they are so very truthful. There’s one that says if you want to shake hands with three duchesses, five countesses, and the very cream of society, you may do it for three guineas.” “Do you call it dear or cheap?” “Dear, monstrously dear. If I were promised cream I should expect strawberries, but under those conditions I should receive nothing better than the leaves.” “Have you ever shaken hands with a duchess?” I asked by way of keeping up the conversation. “Why do you smile? Once I offered to shake hands with an empress.” “And did she return the compliment?” “Oh, no. The temptation to resist me was too great, so she refused; consequently she is serving a term of apprenticeship here. At the same time I offered to shake hands with an emperor, and the temptation _not_ to resist me was also too great; consequently he is here too. Now if the emperor had behaved like the empress, and the empress like the emperor, there is no telling where they might have been.” “It takes a very simple sin then to translate a man from earth to hell,” I remarked.