"He didn't come to oblige his clever wife! He came," said Mrs. Briss, "just to amuse himself. He _has_ his amusements, and it's odd," she remarkably laughed, "that you should grudge them to him!" "It would be odd indeed if I did! But put his proceeding," I continued, "on any ground you like; you described to me the purpose of it as a screening of the pair." "I described to you the purpose of it as nothing of the sort. I didn't describe to you the purpose of it," said Mrs. Briss, "at all. I described to you," she triumphantly set forth, "the _effect_ of it--which is a very different thing." I could only meet her with admiration. "You're of an astuteness----!" "Of course I'm of an astuteness! I _see_ effects. And I saw that one. How much Briss himself had seen it is, as I've told you, another matter; and what he had, at any rate, quite taken the affair for was the sort of flirtation in which, if one is a friend to either party, and one's own feelings are not at stake, one may now and then give people a lift. Haven't I asked you before," she demanded, "if you suppose he would have given one had he had an idea where these people _are_?" "I scarce know what you have asked me before!" I sighed; "and 'where they are' is just what you haven't told me." "It's where my husband was so annoyed unmistakably to discover them." And as if she had quite fixed the point she passed to another. "He's peculiar, dear old Briss, but in a way by which, if one uses him--by which, I mean, if one depends on him--at all, one gains, I think, more than one loses. Up to a certain point, in any case that's the least a case for subtlety, he sees nothing at all; but beyond it--when once he does wake up--he'll go through a house. Nothing then escapes him, and what he drags to light is sometimes appalling." "Rather," I thoughtfully responded--"since witness this occasion!" "But isn't the interest of this occasion, as I've already suggested," she propounded, "simply that it makes an end, bursts a bubble, rids us of an incubus and permits us to go to bed in peace? I thank God," she moralised, "for dear old Briss to-night." "So do I," I after a moment returned; "but I shall do so with still greater fervour if you'll have for the space of another question a still greater patience." With which, as a final movement from her seemed to say how much this was to ask, I had on my own side a certain exasperation of soreness for all I had to acknowledge--even were it mere acknowledgment--that she had brought rattling down. "Remember," I pleaded, "that you're costing me a perfect palace of thought!" I could see too that, held unexpectedly by something in my tone, she really took it in. Couldn't I even almost see that, for an odd instant, she regretted the blighted pleasure of the pursuit of truth with me? I needed, at all events, no better proof either of the sweet or of the bitter in her comprehension than the accent with which she replied: "Oh, those who live in glass houses----"