And I thought somehow that an
arboreal villa agency was a sort of--of compromise between being a
botanist and being a house-agent."
Rupert could not help laughing. "Do you have much custom?" he asked.
"N-not much," replied Mr Montmorency, and then he glanced at
Keith, who was (I am convinced) his only client. "But what there
is--very select."
"My dear friends," said Basil, puffing his cigar, "always remember
two facts. The first is that though when you are guessing about
any one who is sane, the sanest thing is the most likely; when you
are guessing about any one who is, like our host, insane, the
maddest thing is the most likely. The second is to remember that
very plain literal fact always seems fantastic. If Keith had taken
a little brick box of a house in Clapham with nothing but railings
in front of it and had written `The Elms' over it, you wouldn't
have thought there was anything fantastic about that. Simply
because it was a great blaring, swaggering lie you would have
believed it."
"Drink your wine, gentlemen," said Keith, laughing, "for this
confounded wind will upset it."
We drank, and as we did so, although the hanging house, by a
cunning mechanism, swung only slightly, we knew that the great
head of the elm tree swayed in the sky like a stricken thistle.
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