“That’s all very well,” began Lewisham.

“I might forgive them their dishonesty,” said Chaffery, “but the stupidity of it, the mental self-abnegation—­Lord!  If a solicitor doesn’t swindle in the proper shabby-magnificent way, they chuck him for unprofessional conduct.”  He paused.  He became meditative, and smiled faintly.

“Now, some of my dodges,” he said with a sudden change of voice, turning towards Lewisham, his eyes smiling over his glasses and an emphatic hand patting the table-cloth; “some of my dodges are damned ingenious, you know—­damned ingenious—­and well worth double the money they bring me—­double.”

He turned towards the fire again, pulling at his smouldering pipe, and eyeing Lewisham over the corner of his glasses.

“One or two of my little things would make Maskelyne sit up,” he said presently.  “They would set that mechanical orchestra playing out of pure astonishment.  I really must explain some of them to you—­now we have intermarried.”

It took Mr. Lewisham a minute or so to re-form the regiment of his mind, disordered by its headlong pursuit of Chaffery’s flying arguments.  “But on your principles you might do almost anything!” he said.

“Precisely!” said Chaffery.

“But—­”

“It is rather a curious method,” protested Chaffery; “to test one’s principles of action by judging the resultant actions on some other principle, isn’t it?”

Lewisham took a moment to think.  “I suppose that is so,” he said, in the manner of a man convinced against his will.

He perceived his logic insufficient.  He suddenly thrust the delicacies of argument aside.  Certain sentences he had brought ready for use in his mind came up and he delivered them abruptly.  “Anyhow,” he said, “I don’t agree with this cheating.  In spite of what you say, I hold to what I said in my letter.  Ethel’s connexion with all these things is at an end.  I shan’t go out of my way to expose you, of course, but if it comes in my way I shall speak my mind of all these spiritualistic phenomena.  It’s just as well that we should know clearly where we are.”

“That is clearly understood, my dear stepson-in-law,” said Chaffery.  “Our present object is discussion.”

“But Ethel—­”

“Ethel is yours,” said Chaffery.  “Ethel is yours,” he repeated after an interval and added pensively—­“to keep.”

“But talking of Illusion,” he resumed, dismissing the sordid with a sign of relief, “I sometimes think with Bishop Berkeley, that all experience is probably something quite different from reality.  That consciousness is essentially hallucination.  I, here, and you, and our talk—­it is all Illusion.  Bring your Science to bear—­what am I?  A cloudy multitude of atoms, an infinite interplay of little cells.  Is this hand that I hold out me?  This head?  Is the surface of my skin any more than a rude average boundary?