at he
remembered. She did so, with a bound.

"I said, my dear (and I am glad you recollect it, Conrad)--I said from
the very first, when Mr. Fenwick was living at Krakatoa--(it was all
_quite_ right, my dear. Do you think I don't know? A grown-up daughter
and two servants!)--I said that any one with eyes in their head could
see. And has it turned out exactly as I expected, or has it not?"

"Exactly."

"Very well, dear. I'm glad you say so. Now, don't contradict me
another time."

The close observer of the actual (whom we lay claim to be) has
occasionally to report the apparently impossible. We do not suppose
we shall be believed when we say that Mrs. Vereker added: "Besides,
there was the Major."

* * * * *

Professor Sales Wilson, Laetitia's father, was _the_ Professor Sales
Wilson. Only, if you had seen that eminent scholar when he got outside
his library by accident and wanted to get back, you wouldn't have
thought he was _the_ anybody, and would probably have likened him to
a disestablished hermit-crab--in respect, that is, of such a one's desire
to disappear into his shell, and that respect only. For no hermit-crab
would ever cause an acquaintance to wonder why he should shave at all
if he could do it no better than that; nor what he was talking to
himself about so frequently; nor whether he polished his spectacles so
long at a time to give the deep groove they were making across his nose
a chance of filling up; nor whether he would be less bald if he rubbed
his head less; nor what he had really got inside that overpowering
phrenology of brow, and behind that aspect of chronic concentration.
But about the retiring habits of both there could be no doubt.

He lived in his library, attired by nature in a dressing-gown and
skull-cap. But from its secret recesses he issued manifestoes which
shook classical Europe. He corrected versions, excerpted passages,
disallowed authenticities, ascribed works to their true authors, and
exposed the pretensions of sciolists with a vigour which ought to have
finally dispersed that unhallowed class. Only it didn't, because they
are a class incapable of shame, and will go on madly, even when they
have been proved to be _mere_, beyond the shadow of a doubt. Perhaps
they had secret information about the domestic circumstances of their
destroyer, and didn't care. If Yamen had had private means of knowing
that Vishnu was on uncomfortable terms with hi