, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you are guessing
about any one who is, like our host, insane, the maddest thing is the
most likely. The second is to remember that very plain literal fact
always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken a little brick box of a house
in Clapham with nothing but railings in front of it and had written 'The
Elms' over it, you wouldn't have thought there was anything fantastic
about that. Simply because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you
would have believed it."

"Drink your wine, gentlemen," said Keith, laughing, "for this confounded
wind will upset it."

We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a cunning
mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great head of the elm
tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.

Chapter 5. The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd

Basil Grant had comparatively few friends besides myself; yet he was
the reverse of an unsociable man. He would talk to any one anywhere, and
talk not only well but with perfectly genuine concern and enthusiasm for
that person's affairs. He went through the world, as it were, as if he
were always on the top of an omnibus or waiting for a train. Most of
these chance acquaintances, of course, vanished into darkness out of his
life. A few here and there got hooked on to him, so to speak, and became
his lifelong intimates, but there was an accidental look about all of
them as if they were windfalls, samples taken at random, goods fallen
from a goods train or presents fished out of a bran-pie. One would
be, let us say, a veterinary surgeon with the appearance of a jockey;
another, a mild prebendary with a white beard and vague views; another,
a young captain in the Lancers, seemingly exactly like other captains
in the Lancers; another, a small dentist from Fulham, in all reasonable
certainty precisely like every other dentist from Fulham. Major
Brown, small, dry, and dapper, was one of these; Basil had made his
acquaintance over a discussion in a hotel cloak-room about the right
hat, a discussion which reduced the little major almost to a kind of
masculine hysterics, the compound of the selfishness of an old bachelor
and the scrupulosity of an old maid. They had gone home in a cab
together and then dined with each other twice a week until they died. I
myself was another. I had met Grant while he was still a judge, on the
balcony of the National Liberal Club, and exchanged a few words a