,
I say after some hesitation, but he must promise to bring it back. He
grows fervent. Of course he will bring it back, by Saturday at the very
latest and in person. And he is my man from that moment. I have lost the
book, of course, but I have smuggled my troops within the fort, I have
laid the train, I have transmitted the infection. The serpent is in the
garden. Time will do the work." The allusion was to Cooper's bookplate,
a red serpent about a golden staff.

"Not that I leave it altogether to time," says Cooper. "Once I have
handed over the book to Hobson, I make it a point to call on him at
least once a week. Do you see why? Left to himself, Hobson might soon
outlive the first flush of his enthusiasm for that book. But if Hobson
expects me to drop in at any moment, he is afraid I may find the book on
his library table and ask him whether he has read it. So he hides the
book in his bedroom. Then he is indeed mine. Some night he will be out
of sorts and find it hard to go to sleep. His eye will fall on the book
lying there on his table, and he will pick it up, at the same time
lighting a cigar. I shall never see that book again. But, I leave it to
you, who needs that book more, I or Hobson?"

But Cooper did not tell all. I know he has made use of shrewder tactics.
Ask any one of his acquaintances why Cooper is never seen without a
half-dozen magazines under his arm, an odd volume or two of French
criticism, and a couple of operatic scores. They will reply that it is
just Cooper's way. It goes with his black slouch hat, his badly-creased
trousers, his flowing cravat, and his general air of pre-Raphaelite
ineptitude. It goes with his comprehensive ignorance of present-day
politics and science, and everything else in the present that
well-informed people are supposed to know. It goes with his total
inability to be on time for dinners, and his habit of getting lost in
the subway. But Cooper is not as often in the clouds as some imagine.

How many of Cooper's friends, for example, have ever found peculiar
significance in his talent for forgetting things in other people's
houses? Beneath that apparently characteristic trait there is a
Machiavellian motive which I alone have found out. Hobson, let us say,
has been taking dinner with Cooper, who gently pulls a copy of "Monna
Vanna" from the shelf. Hobson does not rise to the bait. He may have
heard that Maeterlinck is a "highbrow" and it frightens him. Or Hobson
may not