His chair turned sideways to the table, his legs crossed, the fingers of one hand playing caressingly with his wine glass, the other manipulating his cigar, Mr. Cardan looked on, while his host, the tears streaming down his cheeks, his narrow face distorted almost out of recognition, laughed and sobbed, now throwing himself back in his chair, now covering his face with his hands, now bending forward over the table to rest his forehead on his arms, while his whole body shook and shook with the repeated and uncontrollable spasms. A disgusting sight, thought Mr. Cardan; and a disgusting specimen too. He began to have an inkling of what the fellow was up to. Translate “intelligent man” and “moron” into “me” and “my sister”—for the general, the philosophical in any man’s conversation must always be converted into the particular and personal if you want to understand him—interpret in personal terms what he had said about vivisection, animal rights and the human hierarchy, and there appeared, as the plain transliteration of the cipher—what? Something that looked exceedingly villainous, thought Mr. Cardan. “Then I suppose,” he said in a very cool and level voice, when the other had begun to recover from his fit, “I suppose it’s your sister who has the liberating cash.” Mr. Elver glanced at him, with an expression of surprise, almost of alarm, on his face. His eyes wavered away from Mr. Cardan’s steady, genial gaze. He took refuge in his tumbler. “Yes,” he said, when he had taken a gulp. “How did you guess?” Mr. Cardan shrugged his shoulders. “Purely at random,” he said. “After my father died,” Mr. Elver explained, “she went to live with her godmother, who was the old lady at the big house in our parish. A nasty old woman she was. But she took to Grace, she kind of adopted her. When the old bird died at the beginning of this year, Grace found she’d been left twenty-five thousand.” For all comment, Mr. Cardan clicked his tongue against his palate and slightly raised his eyebrows. “Twenty-five thousand,” the other repeated. “A half-wit, a moron! What can she do with it?” “She can take you to Italy,” Mr. Cardan suggested. “Oh, of course we can live on the interest all right,” said Mr. Elver contemptuously. “But when I think how I could multiply it.” He leaned forward eagerly, looking into Mr. Cardan’s face for a second, then the shifty grey eyes moved away and fixed themselves on one of the buttons of Mr. Cardan’s coat, from which they would occasionally dart upwards again to reconnoitre and return. “I’ve worked it out, you see,” he began, talking so quickly that the words tumbled over one another and became almost incoherent. “The Trade Cycle.... I can prophesy exactly what’ll happen at any given moment. For instance....” He rambled on in a series of complicated explanations. “Well, if you’re as certain as all that,” said Mr. Cardan when he had finished, “why don’t you get your sister to lend you the money?”