nd I will not pursue it. All I mean is, my dear Trent,
that there are really remarkable things going on all round us if we
will only see them; and we do our perceptions no credit in regarding as
remarkable only those affairs which are surrounded with an accumulation
of sensational detail.'

Trent applauded heartily with his knife-handle on the table, as Mr
Cupples ceased and refreshed himself with milk and soda water. 'I have
not heard you go on like this for years,' he said. 'I believe you must
be almost as much above yourself as I am. It is a bad case of the unrest
which men miscall delight. But much as I enjoy it, I am not going to sit
still and hear the Manderson affair dismissed as commonplace. You may
say what you like, but the idea of impersonating Manderson in those
circumstances was an extraordinarily ingenious idea.'

'Ingenious--certainly!' replied Mr Cupples. 'Extraordinarily so--no! In
those circumstances (your own words) it was really not strange that
it should occur to a clever man. It lay almost on the surface of the
situation. Marlowe was famous for his imitation of Manderson's voice; he
had a talent for acting; he had a chess-player's mind; he knew the
ways of the establishment intimately. I grant you that the idea
was brilliantly carried out; but everything favoured it. As for the
essential idea, I do not place it, as regards ingenuity, in the same
class with, for example, the idea of utilizing the force of recoil in a
discharged firearm to actuate the mechanism of ejecting and reloading.
I do, however, admit, as I did at the outset, that in respect of
details the case had unusual features. It developed a high degree of
complexity.'

'Did it really strike you in that way?' enquired Trent with desperate
sarcasm.

'The affair became complicated,' went on Mr Cupples unmoved, 'because
after Marlowe's suspicions were awakened, a second subtle mind came
in to interfere with the plans of the first. That sort of duel often
happens in business and politics, but less frequently, I imagine, in the
world of crime.'

'I should say never,' Trent replied; 'and the reason is, that even the
cleverest criminals seldom run to strategic subtlety. When they do, they
don't get caught, since clever policemen have if possible less strategic
subtlety than the ordinary clever criminal. But that rather deep quality
seems very rarely to go with the criminal make-up. Look at Crippen. He
was a very clever criminal as they go