Fer-De-Lance

At bedtime the evening before Wolfe had given me no instructions whatever. Saying that he preferred to leave me fancy free, he had merely repeated his favorite saying, any spoke will lead an ant to the hub, and had reminded me that our great advantage lay in the fact that no one was aware how much or how little we knew and that on account of our original coup we were suspected of omniscience. He had finished, after a yawn that would have held a tennis ball: "Return here with that advantage unimpaired."

I said to Miss Barstow, "You may not have any orchids here, but you certainly have a flower or two."

She said, "Yes, I suppose so.-I asked Small to bring you out here because I thought we should not be interrupted. You will not mind."

"No indeed. It’s nice out here. I’m sorry to have to pester you, but there’s no other way to get the facts. Wolfe says that he feels phenomena and I collect facts. I don’t think that means anything, having looked up the word phenomena in the dictionary, but I repeat it for what it’s worth." I took out my notebook. "First just tell me things. You know, the family, how old are you, who you’re going to marry and so on."

She sat with her hands together in her lap and told me. Some of it I had read in the papers or got out of Who’s Who, but I didn’t interrupt. There was only her mother, her brother and herself. Lawrence, her brother, was twenty-seven, two years older than her; he had graduated from Holland at twenty-one and had then proceeded to waste five years (and, I gathered between the lines, a good portion of his father’s time and patience also). A year ago he had suddenly discovered a talent for mechanical design and was now devoted to that, especially as applied to airplanes. Her mother and father had been mutually devoted for thirty years. She could not remember the beginning of her mother’s difficulty, for that had been years before when Sarah was a child; the family had never considered it a thing to be ashamed of or to attempt to conceal, merely a misfortune of a loved one to sympathize with and as far as possible to ameliorate. Dr. Bradford and two specialists described it in neurological terms, but they had never meant anything to Sarah, to her the terms had been dead and cold and her mother was alive and warm.