Braddle took in without confusion this approach to subtlety. 'But suppose it should be something rather awful?'
It was his confidant, rather, who was a trifle disconcerted. 'Isn't it just as easy—besides being much more comfortable—to suppose there's nothing?'
'No. If it had been, don't you see that I would have supposed it? There's something. I don't know what there is; but there's something.'
'Then ask her.'
Braddle wondered. 'Would you?'
'Oh dear, no!'
'Then I won't!' Braddle returned with an odd air of defiance that made his host break into a laugh. 'Suppose,' he continued, 'she should swear there's nothing.'
'The chance of that is just why it strikes me you might ask her.'
'I "might"? I thought you said one shouldn't.'
'I shouldn't. But I haven't your ideas.'
'Ah, but you don't know her.'
Chilver hesitated. 'Precisely. And what you mean is that, even if she should swear there's nothing, you wouldn't believe her?'
Braddle appeared to give a silent and even somewhat diffident assent. 'There's nothing I should hate like that. I should hate it still more than being as I am. If you had seen more of her,' he pursued, 'you would know what I mean by her having no references. Her whole life has been so extraordinarily—so conveniently, as one might say—away from everything.'
'I see—so conveniently for her. Beyond verification.'
'Exactly; the record's inaccessible. It's all the "great West." We saw something of the great West, and I thought it rather too great. She appears to have put in a lot of California and the Sandwich Islands. I may be too particular, but I don't fancy a Sandwich Islands past. Even for her hus-
