He tells the truth in too exact and bald
a style; he is too veracious."
"Oh! if you are going to be paradoxical," said Rupert
contemptuously, "be a bit funnier than that. Say, for instance,
that he has lived all his life in one ancestral manor."
"No, he's extremely fond of change of scene," replied Basil
dispassionately, "and of living in odd places. That doesn't
prevent his chief trait being verbal exactitude. What you people
don't understand is that telling a thing crudely and coarsely as
it happened makes it sound frightfully strange. The sort of things
Keith recounts are not the sort of things that a man would make up
to cover himself with honour; they are too absurd. But they are
the sort of things that a man would do if he were sufficiently
filled with the soul of skylarking."
"So far from paradox," said his brother, with something rather
like a sneer, "you seem to be going in for journalese proverbs. Do
you believe that truth is stranger than fiction?"
"Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction," said Basil
placidly. "For fiction is the creation of the human mind, and
therefore is congenial to it."
"Well, your lieutenant's truth is stranger, if it is truth, than
anything I ever heard of," said Rupert, relapsing into flippancy.
"Do you, on your soul, believe in all that about the shark and the
camera?"
"I believe Keith's words," answered the other.
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