idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a
bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose.

The great point of it all is, however, that I told George Corvick
what had befallen me and that my information had an immense effect
upon him. He had at last come back, but so, unfortunately, had
Mrs. Erme, and there was as yet, I could see, no question of his
nuptials. He was immensely stirred up by the anecdote I had
brought from Bridges; it fell in so completely with the sense he
had had from the first that there was more in Vereker than met the
eye. When I remarked that the eye seemed what the printed page had
been expressly invented to meet he immediately accused me of being
spiteful because I had been foiled. Our commerce had always that
pleasant latitude. The thing Vereker had mentioned to me was
exactly the thing he, Corvick, had wanted me to speak of in my
review. On my suggesting at last that with the assistance I had
now given him he would doubtless be prepared to speak of it himself
he admitted freely that before doing this there was more he must
understand. What he would have said, had he reviewed the new book,
was that there was evidently in the writer's inmost art something
to BE understood. I hadn't so much as hinted at that: no wonder
the writer hadn't been flattered! I asked Corvick what he really
considered he meant by his own supersubtlety, and, unmistakeably
kindled, he replied: "It isn't for the vulgar--it isn't for the
vulgar!" He had hold of the tail of something; he would pull hard,
pull it right out. He pumped me dry on Vereker's strange
confidence and, pronouncing me the luckiest of mortals, mentioned
half a dozen questions he wished to goodness I had had the gumption
to put. Yet on the other hand he didn't want to be told too much--
it would spoil the fun of seeing what would come. The failure of