As for poor Lushington, Margaret had told him nothing at all, and her
visit to Madame Bonanni had been a secret between herself and Mrs.
Rushmore. Logotheti had not made his appearance after all, but the
young archæologist had brought assurances that the financier would be
honoured, charmed and otherwise delighted to be presented to Mrs.
Rushmore within a day or two, if convenient to her. So it happened that
Logotheti made his first visit after Lushington had left Versailles.
The latter went away in a very disconsolate frame of mind, and
disappeared into Paris. It is not always wise to follow a discouraged
man into the retirement of a shabby room in a quiet hotel on the left
bank of the Seine, and it is never amusing. Psychology in fiction seems
to mean the rather fruitless study of what the novelist himself thinks
he might feel if he ever got himself into one of those dreadful scrapes
which it is a part of his art to invent outright, or to steal from the
lives of men and women he has known or heard of. People who can analyse
their own feelings are never feeling enough to hurt them much; a
medical student could not take his scalpel and calmly dissect out his
own nerves. You may try to analyse pain and pleasure when they are
past, but nothing is more strangely and hopelessly undefined than the
memory of a great grief, and no analysis of pleasure can lead to
anything but the desire for more. The only real psychologists have been
the great lyric poets, before they have emerged from the gloom of
youth.
The outward signs of Lushington's condition were few and not such as
would have seemed dramatic to an acquaintance. When he was in his room
at the hotel in the Rue des Saints Pères, he got an old briar pipe out
of his bag, filled it and lit it, and stood for nearly a quarter of an
hour at the window, smoking thoughtfully with his hands in his pockets.
The subtle analyst, observing that the street is narrow and dull and
presents nothing of interest, jumps to the conclusion that Lushington
is thinking while he looks out of the window. Perhaps he is. The next
thing to be done is to unpack his bag and place his dressing things in
order on the toilet-table. They are simple things, but mostly made
expressly for him, of oxidised silver, with his initials in plain block
letters; and each object has a neat sole leather case of its own, so
that they can be thrown pell-mell into a bag and jumbled up together
without being scratched. But Lushington takes them out of their cases
and disposes them on the table with mathematical precision, smoking
vigorously all the time. This done, he unpacks his valise, his
shirt-case and other belongings, in the most systematic way possible,
looks through the things he left in the room when he went to
Versailles, to see that everything is in order, and at last rings for
the servant to take away the clothes and shoes that need cleaning. The
subtle analyst would argue from all this that Lushington was one of
those painfully orderly persons, who are made positively nervous by the
sight of a hair-brush lying askew, or a tie dropped on the floor.