e is, to shake, but who have learnt Hungarian
by themselves. She conversed perhaps in Hungarian with Corvick; she had
remarkably little English for his friend. Corvick afterwards told me
that I had chilled her by my apparent indisposition to oblige her with
the detail of what Vereker had said to me. I admitted that I felt I had
given thought enough to this exposure: hadn't I even made up my mind
that it was hollow, wouldn't stand the test? The importance they
attached to it was irritating--it rather envenomed my dissent.

That statement looks unamiable, and what probably happened was that
I felt humiliated at seeing other persons derive a daily joy from an
experiment which had brought me only chagrin. I was out in the cold
while, by the evening fire, under the lamp, they followed the chase for
which I myself had sounded the horn. They did as I had done, only
more deliberately and sociably--they went over their author from the
beginning. There was no hurry, Corvick said--the future was before them
and the fascination could only grow; they would take him page by page,
as they would take one of the classics, inhale him in slow draughts and
let him sink deep in. I doubt whether they would have got so wound up
if they had not been in love: poor Vereker's secret gave them endless
occasion to put their young heads together. None the less it represented
the kind of problem for which Corvick had a special aptitude, drew out
the particular pointed patience of which, had he lived, he would have
given more striking and, it is to be hoped, more fruitful examples. He
at least was, in Vereker's words, a little demon of subtlety. We had
begun by disputing, but I soon saw that without my stirring a finger his
infatuation would have its bad hours. He would bound off on false scents
as I had done--he would clap his hands over new lights and see them
blown out by the wind of the turned page. He was like nothing, I told
him, but the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the
cryptic character of Shakespeare. To this he replied that if we had had
Shakespeare's own word for his being cryptic he would immediately have
accepted it. The case there was altogether different--we had nothing
but the word of Mr. Snooks. I rejoined that I was stupefied to see him
attach such importance even to the word of Mr. Vereker. He inquired
thereupon whether I treated Mr. Vereker's word as a lie. I wasn't
perhaps prepared, in my unhappy rebound, to go as