Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. “You mean that she--”
“I don't see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.
“You implied it; and I don't think it's fair. It's easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the case.”
“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn't think you would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where Acton is, Rulledge.”
“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.
Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.
“Yes,” Minver said, facing about toward me. “How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you're always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?”
“No, I can't,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why.”
“No, you couldn't, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It's part of your swindler to assume that you _do_ know why. You ought to find out.”
Wanhope interposed abstractly, or as abstractly as he could: “The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”
“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don't you do it, Acton?”