"Can she have made a man clever? She can't. She can't at least have begun it. What we shall know the real person by, in the case that you and I are studying, is that the man himself will have made her what she has become. She will have done just what Lady John has not done--she will have put up the shutters and closed the shop. She will have parted, for her friend, with her wit." "So that she may be regarded as reduced to idiocy?" "Well--so I can only see it." "And that if we look, therefore, for the right idiot----" "We shall find the right woman--our friend's mystic Egeria? Yes, we shall be at least approaching the truth. We shall 'burn,' as they say in hide-and-seek." I of course kept to the point that the idiot would have to _be_ the right one. _Any_ idiot wouldn't be to the purpose. If it was enough that a woman was a fool the search might become hopeless even in a house that would have passed but ill for a fool's paradise. We were on one of the shaded terraces, to which, here and there, a tall window stood open. The picture without was all morning and August, and within all clear dimness and rich gleams. We stopped once or twice, raking the gloom for lights, and it was at some such moment that Mrs. Brissenden asked me if I then regarded Gilbert Long as now exalted to the position of the most brilliant of our companions. "The cleverest man of the party?"--it pulled me up a little. "Hardly that, perhaps--for don't you see the proofs I'm myself giving you? But say he _is_"--I considered--"the cleverest but one." The next moment I had seen what she meant. "In that case the thing we're looking for ought logically to be the person, of the opposite sex, giving us the maximum sense of depletion for his benefit? The biggest fool, you suggest, _must_, consistently, be the right one? Yes again; it would so seem. But that's not really, you see, the short cut it sounds. The biggest fool is what we want, but the question is to discover who _is_ the biggest." "I'm glad then _I_ feel so safe!" Mrs. Brissenden laughed. "Oh, you're not the biggest!" I handsomely conceded. "Besides, as I say, there must be the other evidence--the evidence of relations."