It was about an hour later.  Dr. Cyrus Pym had remained for an unprecedented time with his eyes closed and his thumb and finger in the air.  It almost seemed as if he had been “struck so,” as the nurses say; and in the deathly silence Michael Moon felt forced to relieve the strain with some remark.  For the last half-hour or so the eminent criminologist had been explaining that science took the same view of offences against property as it did of offences against life.  “Most murder,” he had said, “is a variation of homicidal mania, and in the same way most theft is a version of kleptomania.  I cannot entertain any doubt that my learned friends opposite adequately con-ceive how this must involve a scheme of punishment more tol’rant and humane than the cruel methods of ancient codes.  They will doubtless exhibit consciousness of a chasm so eminently yawning, so thought-arresting, so—­” It was here that he paused and indulged in the delicate gesture to which allusion has been made; and Michael could bear it no longer.

“Yes, yes,” he said impatiently, “we admit the chasm.  The old cruel codes accuse a man of theft and send him to prison for ten years.  The tolerant and humane ticket accuses him of nothing and sends him to prison for ever.  We pass the chasm.”

It was characteristic of the eminent Pym, in one of his trances of verbal fastidiousness, that he went on, unconscious not only of his opponent’s interruption, but even of his own pause.

“So stock-improving,” continued Dr. Cyrus Pym, “so fraught with real high hopes of the future.  Science therefore regards thieves, in the abstract, just as it regards murderers.  It regards them not as sinners to be punished for an arbitrary period, but as patients to be detained and cared for,” (his first two digits closed again as he hesitated)—­“in short, for the required period.  But there is something special in the case we investigate here.  Kleptomania commonly con-joins itself—­”

“I beg pardon,” said Michael; “I did not ask just now because, to tell the truth, I really thought Dr. Pym, though seemingly vertical, was enjoying well-earned slumber, with a pinch in his fingers of scentless and delicate dust.  But now that things are moving a little more, there is something I should really like to know.  I have hung on Dr. Pym’s lips, of course, with an interest that it were weak to call rapture, but I have so far been unable to form any conjecture about what the accused, in the present instance, is supposed to have been and gone and done.”

“If Mr. Moon will have patience,” said Pym with dignity, “he will find that this was the very point to which my exposition was di-rected.  Kleptomania, I say, exhibits itself as a kind of physical attraction to certain defined materials; and it has been held (by no less a man than Harris) that this is the ultimate explanation of the strict specialism and vurry narrow professional outlook of most criminals.