They were still dancing when I left.
Chapter 6
The Eccentric Seclusion of the Old Lady
The conversation of Rupert Grant had two great elements of
interest--first, the long fantasias of detective deduction in
which he was engaged, and, second, his genuine romantic interest
in the life of London. His brother Basil said of him: "His
reasoning is particularly cold and clear, and invariably leads
him wrong. But his poetry comes in abruptly and leads him right."
Whether this was true of Rupert as a whole, or no, it was
certainly curiously supported by one story about him which I
think worth telling.
We were walking along a lonely terrace in Brompton together. The
street was full of that bright blue twilight which comes about
half past eight in summer, and which seems for the moment to be
not so much a coming of darkness as the turning on of a new azure
illuminator, as if the earth were lit suddenly by a sapphire sun.
In the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had already begun to
flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert talking excitedly,
one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk. Rupert
was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to me the
nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective theories.
He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing
a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a
falling fusee.
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