As for poor Lushington, Margaret had told him nothing at all, and her

visit to Madame Bonanni had been a secret between herself and Mrs.

Rushmore. Logotheti had not made his appearance after all, but the

young archæologist had brought assurances that the financier would be

honoured, charmed and otherwise delighted to be presented to Mrs.

Rushmore within a day or two, if convenient to her. So it happened that

Logotheti made his first visit after Lushington had left Versailles.

The latter went away in a very disconsolate frame of mind, and

disappeared into Paris. It is not always wise to follow a discouraged

man into the retirement of a shabby room in a quiet hotel on the left

bank of the Seine, and it is never amusing. Psychology in fiction seems

to mean the rather fruitless study of what the novelist himself thinks

he might feel if he ever got himself into one of those dreadful scrapes

which it is a part of his art to invent outright, or to steal from the

lives of men and women he has known or heard of. People who can analyse

their own feelings are never feeling enough to hurt them much; a

medical student could not take his scalpel and calmly dissect out his

own nerves. You may try to analyse pain and pleasure when they are

past, but nothing is more strangely and hopelessly undefined than the

memory of a great grief, and no analysis of pleasure can lead to

anything but the desire for more. The only real psychologists have been

the great lyric poets, before they have emerged from the gloom of

youth.

The outward signs of Lushington's condition were few and not such as

would have seemed dramatic to an acquaintance. When he was in his room

at the hotel in the Rue des Saints Pères, he got an old briar pipe out

of his bag, filled it and lit it, and stood for nearly a quarter of an

hour at the window, smoking thoughtfully with his hands in his pockets.

The subtle analyst, observing that the street is narrow and dull and

presents nothing of interest, jumps to the conclusion that Lushington

is thinking while he looks out of the window. Perhaps he is. The next

thing to be done is to unpack his bag and place his dressing things in

order on the toilet-table. They are simple things, but mostly made

expressly for him, of oxidised silver, with his initials in plain block

letters; and each object has a neat sole leather case of its own, so

that they can be thrown pell-mell into a bag and jumbled up together

without being scratched. But Lushington takes them out of their cases

and disposes them on the table with mathematical precision, smoking

vigorously all the time. This done, he unpacks his valise, his

shirt-case and other belongings, in the most systematic way possible,

looks through the things he left in the room when he went to

Versailles, to see that everything is in order, and at last rings for

the servant to take away the clothes and shoes that need cleaning. The

subtle analyst would argue from all this that Lushington was one of

those painfully orderly persons, who are made positively nervous by the

sight of a hair-brush lying askew, or a tie dropped on the floor.




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