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It appeared that Winterman, while lying insensible in the Park, had been robbed of the few dollars he possessed; and on leaving the hospital, still weak and half-blind, he had quite simply and unprotestingly accepted the Wades' offer to give him shelter till such time as he should be strong enough to go to work. "But what's his work?" Bernald interjected. "Hasn't he at least told you that?"
"I shouldn't say he had a quick mind," she continued, reverting apologetically to Winterman. "Sometimes he hardly seems to follow what we're saying. But he's got such sound ideas when he does speak he's never silly. And clever people sometimes are, don't you think so?" Bernald groaned an unqualified assent. "And he's so capable.
"If he'd only keep his beastly pink hands off Pellerin," Bernald groaned, thinking of the thick manuscript condemned to perpetual incarceration in his own desk by the publication of Howland's "definitive" work on the great man.
Wade had said, the first evening, as the two young men, with Wade's mother sat in the sultry dusk, with the Virginian creeper drawing, between the verandah arches, its black arabesques against a moon-lined sky. In the darkness Bernald heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red flit of a cigar through the shrubs.
ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades' must be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn't imaginably be any one else.
Miss Fosdick, who was one of the most advanced exponents of Pellerinism, had large eyes and a plaintive mouth, and Bernald had always fancied that she might have been pretty if she had not been perpetually explaining things. "Yes, I know Isabella Bain told me all about him. Of course you see why, don't you?" Bernald made a faint motion of acquiescence, which she instantly swept aside.
His thought encircled things like the horizon at sea. He didn't, as it happened, touch on lofty themes Bernald was gleefully aware that, to Howland Wade, their talk would hardly have been Talk at all but Winterman's mind, applied to lowly topics, was like a powerful lens that brought out microscopic delicacies and differences.
Beecher Bain, a quiet man with a mild brow, who was smoking a surreptitious cigar over the last number of the Strand. Mr. Bain, at Bernald's approach, dissembled the Strand under a copy of the Hibbert Journal, but tendered his cigar-case with the remark that stocks were heavy again; and Bernald blissfully abandoned himself to this unexpected contact with reality.
There was, at any rate, no denying that the affair had become unexpectedly complex, and that its farther development promised to be rich in comedy. In the charmed contemplation of these possibilities Bernald sat over his fire, listening for Pellerin's ring. He had arranged his modest quarters with the reverent care of a celebrant awaiting the descent of his deity.
It seems that everything in the article that isn't pure nonsense is just Pellerinism. Howland thinks poor Winterman must have been tremendously struck by Pellerin's writings, and have lived too much out of the world to know that they've become the text-books of modern thought. Otherwise, of course, he'd have taken more trouble to disguise his plagiarisms." "I see," Bernald mused.
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