You say it is my mind that is me?  But consider the war of motives.  Suppose I have an impulse that I resist—­it is I resist it—­the impulse is outside me, eh?  But suppose that impulse carries me and I do the thing—­that impulse is part of me, is it not?  Ah!  My brain reels at these mysteries!  Lord! what flimsy fluctuating things we are—­first this, then that, a thought, an impulse, a deed and a forgetting, and all the time madly cocksure we are ourselves.  And as for you—­you who have hardly learned to think for more than five or six short years, there you sit, assured, coherent, there you sit in all your inherited original sin—­Hallucinatory Windlestraw!—­judging and condemning. You know Right from Wrong!  My boy, so did Adam and Eve ... so soon as they’d had dealings with the father of lies!”

* * * * *

At the end of the evening whisky and hot water were produced, and Chaffery, now in a mood of great urbanity, said he had rarely enjoyed anyone’s conversation so much as Lewisham’s, and insisted upon everyone having whisky.  Mrs. Chaffery and Ethel added sugar and lemon.  Lewisham felt an instantaneous mild surprise at the sight of Ethel drinking grog.

At the door Mrs. Chaffery kissed Lewisham an effusive good-bye, and told Ethel she really believed it was all for the best.

On the way home Lewisham was thoughtful and preoccupied.  The problem of Chaffery assumed enormous proportions.  At times indeed even that good man’s own philosophical sketch of himself as a practical exponent of mental sincerity touched with humour and the artistic spirit, seemed plausible.  Lagune was an undeniable ass, and conceivably psychic research was an incentive to trickery.  Then he remembered the matter in his relation to Ethel....

“Your stepfather is a little hard to follow,” he said at last, sitting on the bed and taking off one boot.  “He’s dodgy—­he’s so confoundedly dodgy.  One doesn’t know where to take hold of him.  He’s got such a break he’s clean bowled me again and again.”

He thought for a space, and then removed his boot and sat with it on his knee.  “Of course!... all that he said was wrong—­quite wrong.  Right is right and cheating is cheating, whatever you say about it.”

“That’s what I feel about him,” said Ethel at the looking-glass.  “That’s exactly how it seems to me.”

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE CAMPAIGN OPENS.

On Saturday Lewisham was first through the folding doors.  In a moment he reappeared with a document extended.  Mrs. Lewisham stood arrested with her dress skirt in her hand, astonished at the astonishment on his face. “I say!” said Lewisham; “just look here!”

She looked at the book that he held open before her, and perceived that its vertical ruling betokened a sordid import, that its list of items in an illegible mixture of English and German was lengthy. “1 kettle of coals 6d.” occurred regularly down that portentous array and buttoned it all together.  It was Madam Gadow’s first bill.  Ethel took it out of his hand and examined it closer.  It looked no smaller closer.  The overcharges were scandalous.  It was curious how the humour of calling a scuttle “kettle” had evaporated.